“Othay,” I murmured, my lips twisting into a scowl when I unintentionally screwed up the hard ‘k’ sound.
If Therese noticed, she wasn’t bothered by it, instead giving me a warm smile. “Great! So while we wait, what brought you to the mall? I came straight from school and decided I should grab a small bite to eat before I dive into shopping.”
I tilted my head in confusion. I almost started to type my question on the phone before remembering she had correctly interpreted the ASL used by the cashier. I moved her phone to my left hand then cautiously held up my index finger, waggled it back and forth, pushed my open palm towards her, then brought my bunched together fingers up to tap by my mouth. ‘Where’s your food?’
“It’s at the table right over there,” she replied as she pointed to a table at the edge of the area I had passed through to get here, clearly understanding me without issue. “That’s how I saw you and everything that happened, actually. I knew I wanted to say hi, and when I got up to come over, you had the accident with your own phone.”
I nodded my understanding. I almost typed out my next question again, not knowing the word for shopping, but my thumbs paused over the on-screen keyboard as determination welled up in me. Hadn’t I just been thinking about how I had screwed myself over by not practicing enough? No, fuck that. Burn me once, shame on… Well, it was still shame on me, I suppose, but the point remained that I needed to put some effort in.
I determinedly handed her back her phone, and where I had expected her to tell me it was okay to hold onto it if I needed the crutch, she actually accepted it back without comment. If anything, she had a gentle but knowing look in her eye. My hands free, I brought my open palm up to the side of my head and flicked my index, middle, and ring fingers down twice before pointing at her, signing, ‘Why’re you.’ Then, not knowing the right sign, I carefully spelled out, ‘shopping.’
“Ah, nothing in particular. I just…” She deflated, looking away with a sad expression. “Well, I suppose I’m having a bad day too. I’m really just here to de-stress.” She then perked back up just a tad, returning to looking at me as she tapped the back of her slightly curved palm against the open palm of her other hand a few times. “This is the sign for shopping, by the way. A friend from Arcadia is deaf, so I know enough to get through basic conversations.”
“Order number sixteen!” The person behind the counter called out, and Therese startled a bit, looking down at the receipt in her hand. “Oh, that’s you! Here, let me help you carry that to my table.”
She was off a heartbeat later, and my eyebrows slightly furrowed. Something about that had tickled the feeling of familiarity, and I found myself wondering again how we had met. She had already admitted we had met before, though not where. It couldn’t have been here—I’d never been to Weymouth until today—and she had mentioned a friend at Arcadia. That didn’t necessarily mean she went there herself, but she was well dressed enough that I suspected it was more likely than not. That meant we hadn’t met at Winslow either, so where had we met?
“Shall we, June?” Therese said as she walked past, pulling me out of my thoughts.
I followed along and took a seat at the table, where a partially consumed veggie wrap and coke were waiting. I couldn’t help bursting into giggles at the sight, and though she gave me a bemused look, Therese didn’t press about why. It was just a silly coincidence, but it had made me laugh, and that lifted some of the weight on my shoulders that had settled itself on my shoulders.
I sat down with a bit of a smile and unwrapped my sub before taking a bite. I moaned just a bit at the flavor bursting across my tongue, and Therese stifled a laugh, earning a mock glare from me.
“Sorry, sorry! The way you enjoy food is just so emphatic!” My ruffled feathers soothed, she pressed on to add, “Anyway, you never did answer my question earlier. What brings you to the mall?”
Whoops. I guess I hadn’t. I swallowed my bite then said, “Friend,” before spelling out ‘clothes’ with ASL letters.
“That can be fun. They didn’t want to eat too?” I looked down at my sub with a frown, debating how to respond, but apparently that was response enough. “Ah, trouble on that front?”
I waggled my hand. It wasn’t ASL, but it got the message across. “No. But.” Ugh. How could I get this across to her?
Ultimately I couldn’t think of a good way to express myself, and she translated that as, “It’s complicated,” which did encapsulate the situation, if a bit broadly. “Well, let’s not worry about that for now, yeah? Let’s enjoy our food while it’s fresh.”
Her wrap had been over here for a bit, so I wasn’t sure ‘fresh’ was the right descriptor, but I didn’t feel like arguing the point. I was hungry, after all. We both ate our food in companionable silence while the low din of people talking throughout the food court intermixed with the muzak into the sort of nebulous noise one rarely heard outside a mall. After a minute without conversation, I began to feel the signs of a fugue. I pulled out my yen and began to roll it over the knuckles of my left hand while continuing to eat with my right. I thought for sure Therese would at the very least question me about the odd display, but while she did look initially confused, she quickly and quietly accepted it and continued eating her food.
My sub was delicious, and despite starting in on it later than Therese had on her wrap, we still finished around the same time. I plopped the yen onto the table and spun it in place for a moment, using the reprieve to tear open the bag of chips and pour them onto the plate my sub had been on. Snatching up the coin and beginning to roll it over my right hand instead, I pushed the plate of chips into the middle of the table and gave her a small smile.
“I shouldn’t,” she demurred.
I cocked an eyebrow at her and said, “A thew,” only to pout at my mangled attempt to say ‘few.’
She still seemed to get the message, and her resistance wavered as she eyed the chips before crumbling pretty much straight away. She reached forward to pick up one chip between her fingers and asked, “So what do you do in your spare time? Besides going clothes shopping with friends, of course.”
I couldn’t say these, but I did know the ASL from practice with Elle. This time I slipped the yen into my pocket, hoping that I had sated my power enough for the time being. With that safely tucked away, I brought my hand to gently cup behind my ear then brought my wrists to where they were more or less crossed and waved my open palm back and forth. ‘Listen to music.’ I then brought my hand to my mouth, extended my index finger and thumb, and pinched them together twice before gently thrusting my index and middle fingers forward in a loose ‘v’ formation. ‘Bird watch.’ Finally, I brought the tips of my middle fingers together with my other fingers back and splayed then gently rocked my hands a bit. ‘Internet.’
Therese’s brow furrowed just a bit. “I understood listening to music and surfing the internet, but what was the middle one? Watching something?”
I carefully spelled out the letters for ‘bird,’ and her eyes lit with understanding. I almost said, “You?” but stopped. There was a more important question to ask: “Bad… day?”
She winced and wilted in on herself. “Ah, I guess I didn’t dodge around that as well as I thought. Yeah… I, uh…”
I was a little thrown by how quickly she was flying from one emotion to the other. She’d done the same earlier when she had mentioned she was having a bad day, and the depressed air had returned with a vengeance now that I had raised the topic back up. Either she was having a very bad day, or… I didn’t want to assume, but if she was indeed trans, then I had been warned starting on hormones could potentially make me moody until my body got used to the new balance. My body had been changed by Amy, so I hadn’t actually gone through it myself, which… was strange in hindsight, since she hadn’t really changed my brain. Wasn’t that the whole point? It took the brain time to get used to the new chemicals or whatever?
“I was sort of wanting to talk to you about it,” Therese finally continued, pulling me from my musing. “After all, you inspired me. Oh, uh, not to have a bad day! I mean, when I met you, I was…” She snatched up another potato chip, grumbling, “Ugh, this all sounded a lot more eloquent in my head.”
The fugue from before was beginning to creep up on me again, but I tried to push through it—yet another thing Dr. Drovanch had been working with me on, albeit with very limited results. Trying to focus on Therese, I carefully signed the letters for, ‘Inspire?’ not understanding what she had meant. Clearly our first meeting—or perhaps even meetings—had clearly been more momentous for her than I had realized, since I didn’t even recognize her. Unless the reason I didn’t recognize her was…
“I’m trans,” she blurted before retreating behind her bottled coke, looking horribly embarrassed.
That dispelled the building fugue. I did my best to give her an encouraging smile, unsure how well I was managing it. Apparently I must not have done too badly, since she seemed to calm and center herself after a bit.
“I just… I’ve known for a while, you know? But my family, they have… expectations of me. My parents built their tech company from the ground up, and I’m their heir. That made things tough enough all on its own, but on top of that, I graduate this May and I’m holding down a job. Combine all that with the doubts, the fears I would never pass…”
She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering a bit despite her long sleeved blouse looking quite warm. “I couldn’t figure out how to navigate all of that, so… I didn’t. I thought I could, you know, wait. Just ignore it. And I did for a while. I was miserable all the time, but I thought it was just the pressure of everyone’s expectations—the weight of the responsibility getting to me. I just kept trudging along until I met you.”
That caught me completely off guard. Unable to contain my bewilderment, I pointed a finger at myself, clearing asking, ‘Me?’
She giggled a bit at that, dispelling some of the funk that had settled over her. “Yeah. You. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I managed to clock you when we met. All that time I spent obsessing over what it would take to pass meant I knew what signs to look for.”
Therese seemed guilty at that and gave me a pleading look. Truth be told, I was a tad bit insulted, but considering I had literally clocked her not even fifteen minutes ago, I felt I could begrudge her that much. I gestured for her to continue and tried to look reassuring, and with a sigh of relief, she pressed on.
“You were so bold—so proud. It was so frankly a bit exhilarating to see you out and living loud that I nearly came out to you on the spot!” she smiled wistfully, plucking up two more chips and popping them into her mouth. As she chewed, I tried to wrap my head around the fact I had inspired anyone to do literally anything. Even stranger, I had done it unintentionally. It was mind-boggling.
She eventually swallowed and took a sip of her drink before continuing. “I chickened out pretty quickly, sad to say. My boss and your… mom were nearby, and I was afraid I’d make a scene. Still, you had inspired me. I’ve seen a couple trans people here in Brockton Bay, but this is the sort of city where you don’t wear your pride on your sleeve. Not with the Empire around. I thought if you could manage that much, then the least I could do was give transitioning a chance, you know?”
Her boss and my mom? I was getting more and more confused by the second. When was it we had met? I would have thought it must have been before Amy changed my body at the hospital—there was nothing to clock now—but if that was the case, then how did she recognize me now?
“I started taking the first steps pretty quickly, but you know how these things go. It’s all so slow.” Therese tugged absentmindedly at one of her curls, and I couldn’t help but think of how I too had badly wanted long hair when I first started transitioning. Her expression soured, and she said, “My parents didn’t take it well at first. Well, they still don’t, really. I think things are getting better, but it can be hard to tell with them. I went back and forth with what to do about school, but in the end, I just couldn’t bear to go back as the old me. I thought… I thought if I was just confident enough, no one would give me trouble.”
Her lip was beginning to tremble. She didn’t say what had happened, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out. Today was Monday, and she had clearly had a bad experience at school with someone. I didn’t even have to think about it—I immediately scooched my chair around the table next to hers and held out my arms in an open invitation. The taller girl didn’t exactly throw herself on me, but she did lean in and begin to gently weep. A few people nearby looked our way curiously—and in one case with open hostility—and I shot the latter an especially icy glare back.
For a couple minutes, Therese just quietly cried as I gently rubbed her back, and without the intense conversation, the fugue began to come over me again. She eventually began to speak again, but the words were difficult to make out between her tears, her face being pressed into my shoulder, and the haze over my thoughts. “I thought Vicky was my friend. She had a hard time when I came out to her, but what she did today was just—” She cut herself off with a wet hiccup and went quiet again for another minute before she mustered up the will to continue. “I just don’t understand why! She says Amy’s been acting oddly since she met you, but to say you’re at fault for this too? It’s insulting to you and me!”
Something about that caught me the wrong way, and I latched onto a discarded penny on the floor a dozen yards away, causing it to spontaneously spin. Clarity came over me, and when it did, I froze. She was talking about Amy and Victoria Dallon. I pulled back without warning, and Therese gave me a surprised look. I tried to sign, but my hands were shaking. Instead, I croaked out, “How?”
“How what?” she asked, too puzzled by my sudden change in demeanor to wipe at the tears still streaming down her cheeks.
“How?” I repeated, my eyes piercing straight into hers. It took several moments for it to click, but I could see it when she realized: ‘June Fujiwara’ had never met Amy Dallon. Victoria blamed Meteor for the change in Amy’s behavior.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“June, I…” she started to say before trailing off, her mouth opening and closing in aborted attempts at words. “I…”
“How?”
She couldn’t look away from me, and I idly noticed she was trembling again, but this time out of fear. It took me a moment to sink in that she was afraid of me—that she thought I was going to hurt her. Worse, I realized I had been debating it. The penny was still spinning, and I had been unconsciously moving it closer and closer to us, bringing it to the point it had a clear shot at her head.
I guiltily let it clatter to the floor and looked away, too ashamed to look her in the eye. I didn’t know how she had figured out I was Meteor, but that alone didn’t warrant me directing such violent thoughts at her, and she had done absolutely nothing beyond that but be nice to me. I took a shaky breath and brought my closed hand to my chest, circling it twice.
‘Sorry.’
“No, I’m sorry,” she insisted, though her point was more than a bit undermined by how she was still trembling. “I knew, and I wanted to tell you, but I can’t… Well I can, but I really shouldn’t tell you how I know.”
‘Amy?’ I signed with weary resignation.
Therese’s face screwed up a bit with an emotion I couldn’t distinguish, and she emphatically denied that. “No. Definitely not Amy. Not Vicky either, before you ask.”
That left me even more confused, but I didn’t get the chance to work through that puzzle because the lights everywhere in the mall suddenly turned off. Lots of people screamed, which was more than a bit silly since it was daytime, which meant there was still a good bit of light coming down from the skylights. The narrow, periodically placed bands of glass running from one side of the mall to the other along the ceiling resulted in rectangular beams of light coming down at regular intervals that gave enough illumination to leave the mall’s interior at gloomy light levels. Combined with the light streaming in from the exterior glass doors of the exit from the food court meant there was more than enough light to see by.
Wait… It was getting gloomier by the second. Why…?
Wispy smoke began to cross over from the darker areas into the patches of light from the skylights, which immediately set me on edge. This wasn’t a power outage—it was something else altogether. As if to prove I was on the right track, the security shutters on the outside of the exterior exits slammed down, cutting off the extra source of light and leaving us with the now smoke obscured light from the roof. That made everyone nearby panic even more and start swarming towards the already closed exit like they had any hope of getting through the steel. Therese and I were seated at a table close to a pillar, and we abandoned our food to scramble closer to it to try and avoid being trampled.
The overhead speakers squealed to life with an awful burst of feedback, which was followed by a man clearing his throat before announcing, “Attention shoppers! We interrupt your regularly scheduled shopping to bring you some exciting news: You’re about to be on the Über and Leet show!”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Therese muttered, her tone half exasperation and half derision as she did something with her phone before tucking it into her bag.
My own phone was vibrating in my jacket pocket, undoubtedly Melanie calling me, but I couldn’t answer with the screen still damaged. I’d have to find them the old fashioned way, though I at least knew where Elle and Spitfire were last and had a rough idea of where they might have gone from there. I needed to know what I was dealing with first though, so I nudged Therese, put my thumb to my chin with all my fingers but my index curled into my palm, then curled my index finger a few times. ‘Who?’
She briefly gave me an incredulous look before saying, “Right, your group is usually out of town. Über and Leet are small-time villains with a video game theme, and they do antics like this, streaming all of it on a delay to online viewers.” She shot a worried look at the people banging on the door and added, “Can you lift that, so they can escape? People are going to get hurt at this rate.”
Huh. I bet Newter likes to watch their show, I thought as I yanked my bag towards me from where I had abandoned it at our table, my scarf already snaking out of it. Any illusions I might have had that Therese was talking about something other than me being Meteor were completely shattered at this point, so in for a penny, in for a pound. My scarf wrapped itself around the bottom half of my face, and I tore the security shutters off the exterior wall altogether, just in case these small-time villains tried to drop them again. The crowd immediately burst through the doors, so I couldn’t remove them altogether without risking hurting someone, but I was at least able to merge the metal framing the doors so they would stay open.
No longer in the habit of keeping an entire bag full of coins on my person at all times, I instead pulled all the coins in the area that weren’t in registers as well as those on the people fleeing the mall straight up into the air, then I had them stream towards me in a torrent of silver interspersed with the occasional purse. I wrapped myself in enough to lift into the air, but paused before I flew off, unsure what to do with Therese.
Turning to her from where I had been looking at the doors, I was startled to find she had pulled a simple band of cloth out of her own bag and wrapped it around the lower half of her face. “Take me with you. I can guide you to the office, so we can stop them.”
Stop them? That… hadn’t been what I’d had in mind. That must have shown on my face, since she hastened to add with a pleading tone, “Please? You should be able to stop these two easily. Leet is a joke of a Tinker—you can break anything he’s made in a heartbeat—and Über’s power is gimmicky at best. It helps him be skilled at things.”
That did sound like a cakewalk, but Melanie tried to have us stay out of local politics as much as possible, and I was on super thin ice after my hostage stunt at the end of the ABB abducting Masuyo. I hesitated for a moment before settling on a compromise, signing the letters for ‘Doors.’
“That sounds good—”
Therese was cut off by the person on the overhead speaker shouting, “Who—?! What the hell, we’re trying to film a show here!”
The floor began to rumble, and I hurriedly wrapped Therese in enough coins to lift her if something happened to the floor under our feet. A moment later, an absolutely horrifying monster burst up through the center of the food court, prompting the remaining mall patrons who either hadn’t gotten through the doors or else had stayed behind to scream in terror. Its pinkish-purple, mottled skin unfurled like a demented flower of flesh, revealing a gaping maw with gigantic teeth and filled with stands of a stringy material. The maw jutted forward like a turtle’s neck out of its body, which was still slithering out of the floor like the world’s most disturbing snake. It had to be at least thirty feet long, and its end hadn’t even emerged yet. It had no eyes that I could see, but it still twisted around, clearly looking over the room until its maw faced me.
Something unintelligible slipped past my lips as my attempt to swear failed altogether in the face of this hideous atrocity. What the fuck?!
A small object flitted through the smoky light overhead, and the voice on the speaker taunted, “Well I suppose Silent Hill does always have a plucky protagonist… Okay, newcomer, show the crowd if you’ve got what it takes!”
The creature roared, surging forward, but though my mouth had failed me, my power hadn’t. I was already a step ahead of it, the myriad of coins I had assembled promptly twisting and fusing together into a sword. My ability to reshape metal wasn’t good enough at fine details to make a sharp sword I could hold in my hands, but at the scale of this creature, it wasn’t difficult to hone the edge into something sharp as I swung it down in a cleaving blow.
The creature tried to dodge, demonstrating that whatever this thing was, it had intelligence behind it. Still, there was only so much it could do to diffuse its forward momentum, so I was able to nearly bisect it from the first swing. Ichorous blood shot from the wound in a great gout that would have covered Therese and me if I hadn’t already been moving us up into the air and away as I took the swing. Still, there was nothing I could do about the acrid smell that made my sub revisit me in the worst way.
“Oh come on! Do you realize how long it took me to make that?! And Heather Mason doesn’t fly or use a sword!”
Who the fuck is Heather Mason? I wondered as the beast sluggishly tried to swipe its tail at me only for Therese to lob a large orb of energy that smacked into it from the side, sending it off course and crashing down into a bunch of thankfully empty tables. So she was a cape. Not that I hadn’t suspected as much, with how readily she had procured and donned that makeshift mask, but it was still something else to see her actually use a power.
The monster started to turn around, only to briefly pause when Therese tossed another orb at it. “Hurry!” she called to me as she continued to throw sphere after sphere, leaving it almost twitching in place. “Try going for the head!”
“You dirty cheat— Hey, who the hell are y—?”
A booming thud emanated from the speakers followed by the sound of a scuffle, but I ignored that in favor of bringing my behemoth of a blade swinging in an arc down at the neck of the still incapacitated worm. Whatever Therese was doing worked like a charm, and even though it clearly tried to move away, it barely got anywhere before my sword beheaded it. The head fell about ten feet to the floor before landing with a sickening squelch and writhing about while the remainder of its body collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. More of the foul smelling blood got everywhere, but not knowing what the head could still manage, I forced myself to focus long enough to plunge the tip of the sword down through the squirming head.
I panted heavily for a moment, the adrenaline still running through me, and looked to Therese, who had reached into her pocket for her phone. Pulling it out, she pressed a button on the side, and after a moment, she clearly spoke into it, “Gamma Alpha Lima Four Two One Nine Eight Nine. Put me through to Console.”
Ah. She must be with the Protectorate then, I thought. Or the Wards, I suppose.
“It’s Über and Leet attacking,” she continued into the phone a moment later, still visibly looking around for any other surprises—which wasn’t a bad idea, now that I thought about it. “Leet biotinkered some sort of… worm monster. We should probably get Panacea in case Leet created some sort of disease.”
Oh shit. I hadn’t even thought about that. Was that something Tinkers with a biological specialty could do? Just whip up some pandemic in the making? The thought that Brood had that card up her sleeve made me very glad she was on our side, even if she wasn’t officially part of the Crew.
I was caught off guard when Melanie’s voice came over the speakers. “Meteor, check for anyone who’s injured in the mall and provide basic first aid if needed. Labyrinth, Spitfire, and I will be doing the same.”
First aid? Why would we…
Therese hung up and looked to me, quietly saying, “We’ve agreed to pay your rates for your help with the attack and the immediate fallout.”
Ah. Well that made more sense. Not that I wasn’t going to do it—like I said, I was on thin ice—but it was still nice to know why we were getting involved any more than necessary. I carefully lowered us down to the floor and pulled the coins on her back over to me while breaking down the sword I had lanced into the floor. Not that I was going to reuse that metal with all the blood and viscera on it, but I figured I could eliminate the ‘remove the giant sword from the food court’ portion of the cleanup for whatever lucky soul got saddled with that task.
“Thanks for your help,” she told me. I couldn’t see her lips through the half mask, but her voice was sunny enough she was probably smiling. “That could have gotten really hairy, really fast.”
It felt strange to be thanked by a hero. Until now, I’d had mostly negative interactions with them, especially the ones here, in Providence, and in Philly. The heroes we’d interacted with in Orlando on that job a few weeks back had been relatively cordial, but it had obviously only been because we had been helping with that huge forest fire. Really they had mostly been paying for Labyrinth’s ability to rapidly create water to douse the fire in key areas and prevent further spread, though Gregor, Newter, and I had all been able to contribute in smaller ways. But this genuine gratitude… This was new.
I pressed my fingers together with my thumb extended, touched the pads of my fingers to my chin, and emphatically brought my hand forward. I’d thought it funny that ASL used ‘thank you’ to respond to ‘thank you,’ but it felt oddly appropriate here. She had been nice to me from the moment she had stepped in at the Italian place, and she was the only hero to ever thank me. Boudicca and the rest of Therese’s superiors could stand to learn a thing or two.
I focused my attention straight away on the people around the doors, trying to remember the tips Masuyo had given about triaging. It looked like there wasn’t a lot I could do to help, since most of the injuries appeared to be broken bones when I glanced over the people on the ground. Treating a broken bone boiled down to applying a bit of pressure with a clean cloth to staunch any bleeding and otherwise leaving things alone for the real professionals to handle. I settled on someone who looked unconscious, which could be quite serious, and started their way only to be brought up short by Therese’s hand on my shoulder.
“Not that one. She’s already dead.”
Dead. Somebody had died because a couple of capes wanted to film a show. I shook my head, disgusted, and silently moved to someone else who had a bit of bone protruding from their leg instead. Therese moved to someone else, and together we made quick work of what needed to be done.
Soon enough I heard the sound of PRT sirens approaching as I finished helping an older man tear a strip off the bottom off his shirt to apply to a gash in his leg. I heard footsteps behind us, not that I hadn’t felt the metal on them coming towards us for sometime, and I turned to find my Melanie, Elle, and Spitfire approaching, all masked up with the backup masks that had been packed just in case before we set out from Palanquin to the ferry dock. Spitfire was hauling a bunch of bags from various clothing stores, looking more like a pack mule than a cape.
Pushed along in front of them were two men with their wrists zip-tied behind them. One was a bulky guy wearing a plain gray t-shirt and jeans with a brown jacket with some sort of collar around his neck that was projecting a digitized face over his own. The other was wearing a patently ridiculous outfit of a long, tattered white skirt that was blood stained and pyramid shaped headgear that sloped forwards towards the ‘nose.’ His chest was bare, which only emphasized his bad slouch—probably from how heavy that helmet had to be—and scrawny frame.
Elle rushed forward to me as I stood, and I swept her up into a tight hug that made the scars on my upper arm feel tight as I stretched them. “Are you okay, Meteor?”
I pulled back before nodding, wary of accidentally hurting her by rubbing my metallic scarf against her. I wasn’t sure if any of the people here had seen me while we ate in the food court or had otherwise seen the whole affair with me dropping my phone, but I figured a degree of separation by not signing might be wise. I tugged the Etch-A-Sketch out of my bag with a quick flick of my power, imposing a message on it.
[Sorry I didn’t answer phone. Dropped it, so the screen is shattered and not working.]
Melanie glanced at the toy before her eyes flicked to the two PRT vans that had just pulled up outside, three ambulances hot on their heels. “Understood. I’ll arrange for a new one later today. The money has already been wired, so if you’re not injured, we’ll leave these two with the PRT and head out straight away. Please bring the car around without the magnetic plates.”
A smile found its way to my lips. Melanie was on top of things as usual. I quickly found our car down around the other side of the building, easily identifiable by the small stash of magnetic license plates attached to the undercarriage. Lifting that up into the air and bringing it our way, I turned to Therese as I moved the Etch-A-Sketch over in front of her. [Thank you for everything. You’ll keep my name secret?]
I still hadn’t figured out how she had pieced together that I was Meteor. She could have been lying about it not being Amy, but I didn’t see what she really had to gain with that lie. But more than how she did it, what mattered most was whether she would keep my identity secret.
“Of course,” Therese said with a firm nod as Melanie handed Über and Leet over to the PRT officers that approached, who hit them with containment foam.
I believed her. I would still have to tell Melanie everything that had happened, just in case, but Therese had been nothing but open, honest, and even vulnerable this whole time. And maybe it was because she said I had inspired her to come out, but above all else, I wanted to believe her and to believe in her. That she would get through the hard days ahead and come out the other side, happier for having planted a flag in the sand and letting the world know who she was—who she really was.
The aluminum in the screen shifted before I could talk myself out of it. [PHO Meteoric_Rise]
I set the car down outside, and Melanie approached, saying, “It’s time to go.”
I nodded and moved to follow her outside, the Etch-A-Sketch flying into my hands, and Therese abruptly called out, “Wait!”
I turned to look back, and she took a deep breath, seemingly steeling herself. “It was nice meeting you or whatever.”
I stared, completely baffled by the incongruous words. She wilted a bit at my non-reaction, clearly having expected me to understand some deeper meaning in them. It took a few seconds of awkward silence as I wracked my brain, but it ultimately clicked, if only because there had been so many other clues she had unintentionally let slip. The mention that I had been excited about food when we met, that her boss and my ‘mom’ were there, that fact that I didn’t recognize her at all… And most importantly, that she was a Ward. The only thing that didn’t line up was the power set, but a cape pretending to be a Tinker was hardly a new concept for me.
Therese was Gallant.