“Hey.”
“Hey.”
The first rays of sunlight were trickling in through the window. Outside the entrance to their bedroom, Matt tugged at the edges of his pyjama shirt and rubbed sleep from his eyes. Over on the couch, in front of the TV, Jane’s head turned, and her tireless face greeted him with a small, tentative smile. Matt wandered over, the floorboards cool against his bare feet, and sunk down beside her onto the couch, close enough for their legs to just be touching. She was already dressed in white‑gold.
“You want a go?” Jane asked, holding up the controller. She’d paused the game, bringing up a quietly shifting image of a serious‑looking man with luscious hair and the many guns in his inventory.
“Nah.” Matt shook his head. He shifted down, snuggling into her. “You keep going.”
Jane unpaused, and the two of them watched for a few minutes as she ran around a derelict mining encampment shooting zombie dogs and irate Spanish peasants. For a time, the soft peace of dawn was broken only by distant gunshots and the inhuman howls emanating from the television. Eventually, a crazy lady with a chainsaw took Jane’s head off.
“Damnit.”
“Bad luck.”
“She always gets me.”
“Have you got the mine launcher yet?”
“No.”
“Damn.”
“Was I supposed to?”
“No actually I think it’s later on.”
“How long did this take you to finish?”
“A couple of days?”
“Hmm,” Jane frowned. She left the game hanging on the death screen, the big bloodred words proclaiming ‘You Are Dead’. “I think you’re better than me.”
“That may be the first time I’ve heard you say that about anything.”
“Please,” said Jane, rolling her eyes. She pushed him lightly on the shoulder, “You’re better at a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“Like cooking,” Jane scoffed. She indicated behind her to the large, open bench running across the kitchen. “You will notice this morning’s efforts consist of milk and cereal.”
“Ah. So only a fifty percent chance of fire.”
“Ha-ha. You think you’re so funny.”
“Woman, I’m hilarious.”
“Well there you go. You’re better at telling jokes.”
“Only because I tell so many bad ones.” Matt leaned up and kissed her on the cheek. “Numbers game.”
They lapsed into a few moments of peaceful silence.
“You’re better at mental defence,” Jane added eventually, seemingly wanting to keep making a list. “You’re better at talking, just generally.”
“Worse at shutting up though.” He glanced at her with a small grin, but Jane kept gazing ahead at the TV. A slight sadness swam around the edges of her eyes.
“You’re better at being nice to people,” she murmured. She gave a dry sniff.
“Hey.” Matt put his hand in her lap, laying it atop hers. “What’s going on? You okay?”
Jane rubbed one eye with the heel of her palm and let out a sigh. “Yeah. I’m fine. I…” She hesitated. “I just feel like we haven’t been talking much lately.”
“You hate talking,” Matt pointed out.
“You know what I mean.” She shook her head and turned to him, making a face. “I know there’s… a lot going on, and you don’t like being stuck inside, but it’s-”
“It’s fine,” said Matt, “We don’t have to talk about it.” He tried to smile, and to make the words conciliatory rather than confrontational. “I know you care about me.”
“I do.”
“And you know I care about you.”
“Sometimes,” Jane mumbled. Matt lay his head on her shoulder.
“Always.”
“Why do we keep arguing then?” she murmured.
Matt shrugged. “People can disagree and still love each other. We just… believe different. True souls can disagree on the colour of a garden.”
“That’s nice. Who said that?”
“I think a crazy person.”
“Oh good.” Jane sniffed again. Then she sighed and set the controller down on the couch. “If you’re up, I should...”
Matt flicked a glance over her uniform. “Big day?”
Jane’s lips twitched, somewhere between a smile and a frown. “Gonna make some enemies.”
“Well, at least there’s a queue.” He reached over and squeezed their shoulders together. For a moment they just sat there, heads resting against one another. “Do good,” Matt said eventually, pulling away, “Get the bad guys.”
“I always do,” Jane chuckled weakly. She turned to him with a small, sad smile. “Don’t eat just Coco‑Pops.”
“Excuse me, I… fine.”
“And cardio?”
Matt sighed. “Yes dear.”
“Good.” Jane’s smile grew a bit brighter. She kissed him on the forehead. Then, pulling back from their sideways embrace, she rose from the couch, leaving Matt alone with the controller. Matt watched over his shoulder as she walked away, cape shimmering in the sunlight.
“Beautiful day for it,” he called after her. He turned back to the bloodstained words still lingering on the TV as Jane’s shining figure stepped out onto the balcony. “Give my regards to the outside.”
*****
Eight miles above the Earth, Jane Walker drifted amongst the clouds.
Alone, wind rippling through her hair, she floated like a swimmer on her back, carried forward by simple momentum across a clear and open sky. Ahead, sunlight crept over the horizon, shining up from beyond the Earth’s curve, drenching the world in gold. Flowing beneath her, Jane’s cape fluttered, licking at clouds like cottonwool. On and on she glided, crisp and breathless, gazing up into the heavens, watching the flawless expanse around her spread from blue to indigo and all the way back down.
Jane smiled, breathing in the bracing cold and the glorious, whispering silence.
Then she closed her eyes, drew a long, deep breath-
-and dropped.
Her body limp, Jane hurtled in a calm and backwards dive, plummeting down into the clouds, rushing through layer after layer of wet and cold, a world of swirling grey; blinding, down, down and down, until abruptly the clouds parted and she emerged into open air-
-and straight into a hail of gunfire.
Jane’s eyes opened. Her smile spread into a wicked grin. She spun to face the dark ground rushing up to meet her and in an instant her body erupted in golden flames.
BOOM
Chaos. Pure, electrifying chaos. Chattering machinegun nests spewed streams of white-hot bullets while anti-aircraft missiles spiralled from mobile emplacements, exploding all around her in mid-air as across the base North Korean soldiers in archaic olive fatigues screamed at each other, scrambling over concrete walls and staircases like ants doused in fresh piss. Jane rocketed through all of it, the maelstrom, unstoppable – a gleeful comet of burning gold.
She dropped through strings of artillery fire, plunging headfirst towards the earth and pivoting sharp right a half second before impact, shooting off horizontal three feet above the ground as the helpless turret emplacements struggled to follow, spewing bullets into the walls. Everywhere, North Korean soldiers screamed words she couldn’t understand but didn’t have to. Fire streamed from their hands and lightning arced from their fingertips, hitting empty air or hitting her, it made no difference. Faster. A boulder erupted in her path – Jane grinned and blasted straight through it. Faster. She angled her body, turning in a tight blazing circle around the compound’s interior, racing round and round and round in a slipstream of burning energy, destroying everything in her way.
Artillery piece. Boom. Troop truck. Straight through. A North Korean soldier screamed obscenities and turned mid-leap into a tiger, lunging at her with razor claws. Jane twisted, caught the big kitty with her boot, and kicked it into the cement.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She burned harder, flying faster, golden flames billowing like a storm, sending men and military equipment flying, cleaving fissures in the defensive redoubt. Soldiers scattered. Concrete crumbled.
And Jane pirouetted out of her spiral and flew straight for the hanger doors.
BOOM
*
‘Don’t stop me now, I’m having such a good time, I’m having a ball-”
The song danced out from the kitchen speakers and Matt found himself quietly humming along. He crouched in front of the oven, pulled open the door with his white-floral oven mitt and slid in a tray of unbaked cookie dough. Chocolate chip. Something of a speciality.
It was mid-afternoon and Matt was alone in the apartment. Jane was out doing something superheroic, the details of which he couldn’t remember beyond that it was something she’d been looking forward to. He was taking a mid-study cookie break because it had been a while since he’d baked anything, and because it made the day feel marginally less fruitless. With the dough set and the speakers slinging tunes, Matt slid around the kitchen in bare feet, enjoying the magic of creation and the freedom to sing free of judgement (Giselle was out getting Chinese food).
‘Don’t stop me- cause I’m having a good time- don’t stop me- yes I’m having a good time-‘
“Don’t wanna stop at all,” Matt hummed, as he placed the second tray on the lower rack and closed the oven door.
350 degrees, fan forced. Did he set a timer? No, Matt decided after a moment’s consideration, there was no need for that. He’d live dangerously.
*
Jane exploded through the hangar doors, sending the fat slabs of steel tumbling back like windblown cardboard.
“Aiiiiieeee!”
“Sagyeog! Sagyeog!”
Beyond the doors there ran a large concrete tunnel, dual security stations built into both walls. The left door plate, some thirty feet wide and twenty feet high, spun off in a pirouette and flattened the left‑most station in a crash of steel and glass. The right door went higher, crashing into the concrete wall above the right-side guardhouse. There was a screaming and scrabbling as those inside scrambled to get clear as the metal began to creak and groan, threatening in mere moments to fall.
Before her, beyond the debris field, an army of soldiers was scrambling into formation, arrayed eight rows deep, aiming guns, hands, rocket launchers. Some man, a commander with a quarter-chest of medals stood at the front, screeching and gesticulating wildly. In the half-second it took for Jane’s eyes to adjust the platoon opened fire, and suddenly the air around her screamed with bullets, flames, lightning, missiles, lasers, acid, sound. The assault slammed into her in a deluge as impotent psychic intrusions simultaneously scratched fruitlessly at her barrier of Psy‑Block. Jane cackled and rocketed forward.
Boom. She slammed through the rows of soldiers, blasting them aside like tenpins, being sure to direct a quick energy burst at that cheeky little neutraliser who was standing in the back holding his hands up and hoping she wouldn’t notice.
“Abeojileul wihae!” Through the scattered bodies and debris a large, muscular man ran at her. He leapt as she passed, managing to grab hold of her ankle. Instantly, he was not one man but twenty, fifty, dozens of identical bodies which swarmed over her, holding on even as she kicked and twisted, shaking some loose, the rest dividing like camo-coloured bubbles trying to slow or weigh her down. Jane grinned and clenched her teeth. The light around her began to burn brighter, white hot. The replications cried out in distress.
Boom. The air around Jane exploded in blinding brilliance, sending the clones flying off into the walls, popping into nothingness. Jane rocketed on, unstoppable, out the main entrance chamber and down the narrow bunker hall.
Boom. Through a checkpoint. Boom, people scattered to the side. Jane hurtled at breakneck speed through twisting tunnels, curved concrete walls a foot away in every direction.
She skidded to a halt, her feet touching down for the first time since she’d entered North Korean airspace, recognising a sign from her brief. BAM! Her golden boot kicked open the steel door.
“Aniyo!”
Behind the locked door, which had probably previously been guarded, lay a bunkhouse of a kind. Cramped metal cots in endless rows stacked floor to ceiling filled every scrap of available space, and around them scurried a horde of thin, terrified Korean people, all of whom now looked at her. The smell of rotting flesh and rancid sewerage hit Jane in a wave, and she struggled not to gag. She glanced up, noting the cameras lining the roof and the remote-controlled gun turrets hanging in the corners. Jane raised a steady hand and blasted the guns out of existence, causing every person in the unwashed, starving crowd to flinch. A few turned their heads on instinct, allowing Jane a glimpse at the wounds festering on the back of their necks. Bombs implanted to detonate should there be any escape attempts.
Good thing she’d just blasted the mother-loving crap out of the monitoring stations and communications array.
Jane let out a sharp, wordless shout. The North Korean prisoners all turned to look at her. She pointed her chin, motioned over-large slapping the back of her neck, then gave everyone a thumbs up. Then she gestured those in the middle out of the way.
A rush of huddled whispers, fear and uncertainty spread over the prisoners’ faces. Only a few people moved. Jane rolled her eyes, squared her stance and cupped her hands together, causing a ball of searing energy to begin growing between her fingertips. Suddenly the Korean prisoners were moving very, very fast.
CRACK-OOM!
Jane twisted and fired, unleashing a devastating blast of golden energy that rocketed through the centre of the room, annihilating the middle-most bunkbeds and tearing through the steel plating on the far side. As the smoke cleared, the damage was evident – an enormous hole punched floor-to-ceiling in the wall and continuing on through the outer concrete and barbed-wire fences, until all that was left was a singed tunnel to the distant smouldering countryside.
Jane relaxed her stance, smiling at her handiwork. The pale, emaciated inmates gaped between her and the smoking, house-sized crater.
“Bali bali,” she told them, pointedly directing a finger at the very large hole in the compound leading to freedom and outside. Azleena had assured her that meant “hurry up.” Jane turned on her heels, leaving the North Korean prisoners to their freedom, and shot off once more in a blaze of golden fire, rocketing down the hallway.
*
2:39pm. Ooh. Matt locked up from the newspaper where he’d been doing the crossword. Time for cookie check. He put his pen down and waddled over to crouch on the balls of his feet to squat in front of the oven. Oh. Yep. Still pale, but the centres had made the dough to cooked transition. Perfect.
Matt pulled on his mitts and opened the oven door, still humming.
*
There. Down the far end of the halls of the concrete bunker, Jane’s golden eyes spied a door unlike any other. Walnut brown and inlaid with beautifully polished panels, jade and gold carved into intricate patterns of mountains, rivers and cherry blossoms, it was guarded by six of the biggest, toughest looking North Korean soldiers she’d seen so far. The six spotted her as she shot round the corner, raising cries of alarm, one turning to liquid steel, one raising an antipathic hand to their forehead, one throwing up hard-light forcefields before her like panes of glass. Two more snapped up high-calibre rifles, and the last one levelled what looked like a trash-can-sized flak cannon at her, the contents of which he held his hand to, imbuing a pulsating violet glow to the shrapnel inside.
The elite guard took aim. Jane grinned.
Twelve seconds later, the door they were guarding exploded open, and the white-gold figure of Lady Dawn shot through.
Jane’s boots skidded to a halt, burning black tracks in the ornate Persian rug. The room she’d breached into was palatial, completely discordant with the military sparseness beyond – high-roofed faux‑wooden ceilings, plush carpet interior, luxurious French-patterned lounges and a vanity chest lined with whisky bottles and crystalline decanters. Huge, gold-framed oil paintings twice her height hung from the walls, depicting the face of a plump, glasses-clad dictator and smiling Korean citizens, soldiers and workers united gloriously under arms. To her right, the room sloped down into a private twelve seat cinema, complete with personal side tables and recliners. To her left, long steps ran upwards into a fifteen-foot high, sweeping office, the walls leading up to the far corners lined with antique tomes and mahogany bookshelves. On the far end of the office, the wall furthest away from her was comprised almost entirely of an enormous fish tank, spotlessly clean and bursting with coral and exotic fish of every shape and colour. Running parallel in front of the fish tank was an enormous oak desk. Behind the desk was a short Korean man in grey whose portrait hung on the wall.
Jane’s face split into a wolfish grin.
“J-j-jeongji!” the little man demanded, his voice cracking as he raised a trembling hand and pointed. Jane strode up the stairs towards him, undeterred. The short, plump-faced man in the grey high‑buttoned military jumpsuit and square clear-frame glasses shrieked and waved his fat hand frantically as the empath marched towards him, his froggy eyes bulging beneath high, frizzy black hair.
“Naneun dangsin-eul pagoehabnida!” he screamed, but absolutely nothing happened and Jane did not pause. The dictator’s eyes raced frantically around the room, looking for his guards, his soldiers, anything, finding nothing but Jane stalking towards him, smiling like she’d won the lottery. Finally, when the empath was maybe seven feet away something broke in the short man’s psyche, and he slammed his face desperately up against the fish tank, mouthing silent hysterical pleas into the glass. Instantly, the fish in the tank grew agitated. One of the larger ones, a salmon, wriggled furiously out from the air‑gap at the top and hurtled itself out into the office, coming to land with a splat at Jane’s feet. It remained there, flopping as aggressively as a fish could flop on carpet. The sight of it caused Jane to actually take pause for a moment, stopping dead her tracks and staring at the flailing, pointless creature, momentarily stunned.
Then she looked back up and locked eyes with the North Korean dictator, stepped around the fish, ripped the two‑hundred-pound desk between them aside with one hand, and grabbed the fat man by the collar.
*
“Ow,” muttered Matt, shaking his hand where he’d accidentally touched the hot baking tray, “Ow. Hot. Ow.” He sucked furiously on the offending finger. This stuff was dangerous. Matt pivoted, gingerly juggling the half‑eaten chocolate chip cookie into his other hand so he could alternate between taking bites and running cold water over his boo-boo.
His finger cooled, Matt re-donned the oven mitt, moved the trays over onto the stovetop next to the waiting wire rack and began spatula-ing cookies over to cool down. When both trays were empty and the racks full, Matt gazed upon his crop of baked goods with a deep sense of personal satisfaction.
See? He’d accomplished something.
*
“AIIIEEEEEE!” the North Korean leader screamed, and Jane cackled. One hand held firm around the scruff of the dictator’s neck, the other punching forward, Jane flew unrestrained through the concrete corridors, a freight-train of golden force, unstoppable. Everywhere, people screamed and scattered. Korean men in lab coats hurled themselves out of the way, soldiers scrambled to aim but froze when they saw Kim Jong-Il’s flailing. The little man squirmed helplessly in Jane’s grasp, his pudgy cheeks flapping as they rocketed, snot and tears streaming down his face and intermingling, begging (she thought) for someone to save him and simultaneously screaming at the soldiers not to shoot, his words lost beneath explosions and the rush of air. The hesitation of the army arrayed against her was fleeting, but by the time they’d processed what they were seeing Jane had already flown past, powering effortlessly through the disorganised North Korean ranks as she dragged their leader one‑handed behind her like a sack of wet kittens. The little man had crapped himself.
Bam! Back through the crumpled gates and out into open air. Shouts went up around her, but again men hesitated as they saw who she was carrying, many of them in her brief glimpses seeming to be undergoing some kind of existential shock. Jane didn’t wait to let them process. She skidded to a halt, looked up at the sky, and with the fat little Korean dictator in one hand shot straight upwards, a comet of shining gold. The wind whipped through her hair and she let out a triumphant laugh, looping through the air with her infamous prisoner dangling helplessly in one hand behind her. She pulled out of a turn and the little tyrant threw up, a rain of brown‑green chunks which quickly dissipated on the fortress below. Jane cackled and angled sideways.
Alone once more save for her cargo, Jane soared above the clouds, out over the Yellow Sea and to a waiting US Army cargo plane chugging patiently through the sky. As she approached, the rear loading ramp opened, and without hesitation Jane flew up and flung the terrified Kim Jong‑Il inside, his round body bouncing off the metal cargo hold floor like a porpoise tossed on the beach. The dictator curled into the foetal position, his formerly grey jumpsuit now a patchwork of bodily fluids, cowering his head between his hands and alternating between trembling whispers and the occasional hysterical shriek. Jane turned away without a backwards glance, leaving the small man to the circle of large marines advancing to surround him, blocking his quailing body from view. She closed her eyes and tumbled back behind the plane, revelling in the bluebird cold and spinning golden circles through the sky.