I woke up comfortable, clean, and not screaming.
It didn’t really strike me as odd, the way most things don’t the first couple minutes after waking up.
What did end up jolting me fully into consciousness was that I realized I was deeply nestled into somebody’s embrace.
My eyes shot open.
It was dim, but not dark, with just enough light filtering in through the deeply tinted window to see clearly. Alex’s head rested above mine, eyes closed, face pressed into a pillow, blonde hair fanned around her head, mouth slightly open, a small spot of drool leaking from the corner of her lips as she lightly snored. She had her arms wrapped around me. My head rested mostly on her shoulder, pressed into the hollow of her neck. We were laying together in a soft, plush queen bed between silky sheets and beneath a light quilt.
And that was my first experience waking up after a night of fuzzy memories in bed with someone. No alcohol required, just extreme trauma—the Anna Jones special.
After a moment of utter existential panic, I realized we were both clothed. I was in blue pajamas that didn’t quite fit, and Alex was still in her hero costume. So that was a…relief? I wasn’t nearly awake enough to examine the rush of other feelings stirring in me.
Still, I strained to force my brain to reboot and actually clue me in to how I had ended up here.
After stepping through the telegate, I had only gotten a brief impression of some kind of militarized compound, much like the one I had just left, except with more people in evidence. I say “brief” because three seconds later, my body decided to give out and my mind followed suit. I collapsed on the ramp and started screaming. The dam had broken.
I remember being swarmed by bodies, and Alex shouting at everyone to give me room. After that, doctors, and an exam table that I’d needed to be sedated be in the same room with. The rest of the night had a blanket thrown over it, aside from impressions. Alex arguing with doctors. Alex arguing with another person in white, not a doctor. Alex picking me up in her arms and arguing with a line of men in fatigues with guns. Alex driving a pickup truck with me curled up in the seat. Alex carrying me again. Alex—oh god, Alex bathing me.
My body flushed with pure mortification. I mean, we were both women. It wasn’t like we didn’t have the same…bits. But the only people to actually see those bits since I was very young were the Liebowitzes, and they were doctors so it didn’t count. I don’t even think Dane had gotten a particularly good look. That had been accomplished mostly by feel and hormonal determination.
I finally remembered her tucking me into bed, only for me to beg her to stay with me until I fell asleep. I think I’d been convinced that it was all another delusion and I was going to wake back up in my cell. At that point, I couldn’t say if the fuzziness was the chemical cocktail they’d given me or my psyche imploding. I just knew Alex held me until no more impressions floated into my mind. And apparently a lot longer than that.
And as much as I realized that I really didn’t mind morning cuddles, I also realized that I really had to pee.
I began the process of trying to gently extricate myself from Alex only to make another discovery—I was connected to an IV. It was hooked to the back of my right hand, the line running to a stand beside the bed. This made it even more cumbersome, but eventually, I managed to wiggle free and move to the edge of the bed, where I sat up. Alex mumbled something sleepily behind me, but otherwise didn’t stir.
Out from under the covers, it was chilly. Alex either kept it cold or we were somewhere in the Arctic. The room was fairly small, cozy, and—well, not quite my style. There were things in it, for one. Lots of things. Things on the walls, things on shelves on the walls, things on a dresser, things on the two bedside tables. There were a lot of pictures, mostly shots of striking landscapes, which might be explained by the jumble of photography paraphernalia piled on a chair in the corner. There were also postcards from around the world, and enough snowglobes to cause a second ice age.
I deduced that this was either Alex’s house or a wacky bed-and-breakfast with very permissive check-in times, and since I didn’t see any breakfast, I assumed the former. I had never taken Alex for a snowglobe type of person.
Experimentally, I opened my mind a bit, and then gasped and hurriedly raised my mental defenses to maximum. Judging from the emotional noise and abundance of mental presences, we were in an apartment building in a city. Since we’d come through a telegate, it could have been any city, but I knew pretty instinctively it was the city. Sanctum City. It just had that feel.
I stood carefully, and was surprised to find that I felt totally fine. I realized I had felt fine since I woke up, and I bounced on the balls of my feet experimentally. No sudden sharp jolts of pain, strain, or fatigue. I gave my body a once over and saw nothing but healthy, if pale, unblemished skin. I had expected to be one giant bruise after getting jackhammered into the wall by the deathbot.
Interesting, but questions for later, when Alex was awake.
I picked up the IV stand and carried it to the door.
I stepped out cautiously, sticking my head out first and looking both ways like it was a busy highway. But it was just a hallway, with more kitschy curiosities lining the cream-colored walls. Alex must have traveled a lot.
I wasn’t sure where the bathroom was, but my first guess—the end of the hallway—was correct. It was small and rather messy, with clothes strewn on the floor and more makeup products than I’d known existed on the sink. It took me a second to figure out what looked so odd about it, and then I realized—no mirror. There was a place on the wall where a mirror should be, but she’d taken it down.
I did my business, and then looked for something I could use to clean my teeth. I’d have settled for mouthwash, but when I opened one of the drawers, I found a toothbrush still in the packaging. It had a tiny red Christmas bow on it, and she had written in black marker across the front—
TO: DORK
LOVE: ALEX
I held it close for a moment. She really did care.
After I brushed my teeth, I made my way back down the hall. I considered going back in to lay down, but now that I was moving, I knew I wouldn’t be going back to bed any time soon. Also, I didn’t want to wake up Alex. So instead I found a staircase, and then awkwardly wrestled the IV stand downstairs.
Alex’s downstairs was nice. Different than the upstairs, with a bunch of ultramodern furniture, and the color scheme seemed to be primarily white accented in stainless steel. It was in danger of feeling cold and sterile, but for the random, oddly charming spots of clutter and quirk that let you know a person actually lived here. Her main display piece in the foyer, for instance, was a glass and steel cabinet full of of little—and a few very big—plastic figurines on round bases. At first, I thought they were just fantasy creatures, but then I realized that a lot of them had guns, and more than a few of the larger figures were vehicles, or full on tanks. The tanks reminded me a lot of the SCAR troop transports, for some reason.
It was then I caught the earthy aroma of coffee, and found myself following it to the dark kitchen, my feet simply carrying me in that direction without giving my brain much in the way of choice.
There was most of a pot of coffee in the machine on the counter, and I hurried over to it without looking around too much. I didn’t even bother to look for a lightswitch—there was just enough light filtering in from the nigh-opaque tinted window to see, and that was all I needed. I relied on the natural human tendency to put the coffeemaker directly beneath the cabinet with the coffee cups, and was once again proven correct. I set my IV stand next to me, pulled one down, and started pouring myself a cup. It’s hard to pour something frantically, but I feel like I managed.
I brought the cup up to my lips and took a greedy sip. It was hot enough to burn, and absolutely delicious.
“Well, mate,” said a woman’s voice from behind me, “if you’re a burglar, you’ve got strange priorities.”
I spit coffee on the wall, slopped a lot more on my hand, and spun around, gathering power into my palm, ready to unleash it at the source of the voice.
“Don’t shoot!” said the speaker in mock alarm. “I’m too hot to die!”
A blue-haired, heavily tattooed woman sat at Alex’s small kitchen table eating a bowl of shredded wheat. If she was even a little alarmed by having the power of a wrecking ball pointed at her, she didn’t show it. She watched me and placidly lifted her spoon up to her mouth.
She was completely nude.
My eyes went wide, my cheeks flushed, and my heart felt like it skipped several beats. I looked away quickly, which clashed with my other instinct to not let a threat out of my sight. I ended up trying to watch her out of the corner of my eye, which felt like failed in both respects and probably looked pretty stupid on top of it.
She chortled.
I made several abortive attempts to speak, before finally managing to ask, “Who are you?”
She snorted. “Who the fuck are you? I’ve been here. You’re new. You explain first.”
“I’m Anna.”
“Well, Anna, if you’re going to blast me, try using your fingers.” She waggled her eyebrows. “More fun that way.”
“I—” I cleared my throat and decided that the naked lady eating cereal at the breakfast table probably wasn’t a threat. I lowered my hand and the white light dispersed with a low whumph. “Sorry.”
“‘Sorry,’ she says.” The blue-haired girl gestured expansively with her spoon and expounded, “Here I am, minding my own business, trying to eat the only easy breakfast food you have in the States that doesn’t taste like diabetes, and then some random stranger comes in and threatens my life, then interrogates me about what I’m doing, and now she wants to say ‘sorry?’” She abruptly settled down and shrugged. “Fair enough.”
I stared at nothing for a moment—specifically not at her—and then turned back to the counter. I found a washrag in Alex’s kitchen sink, wiped up the mess I had made. I then hesitantly took my coffee and IV stand to the table.
“Ah yes, coffee and saline,” she said. “Just like my good ole mum used to make.”
I sat across from her, careful about where my eyes were pointed. She wasn’t lying about being attractive. I’d even say beautiful, but that has connotations of class and refinement, and she clearly had taken purposeful steps to thwart any attempts at ascribing either of those things to herself. She had bold, striking features, and not a single one of them escaped being pierced, often multiple times. Her hair had been dyed blue, and styled in a swept-over undercut, grown out long on one side, and shorn on the other. Her arms and most of her upper body were covered in tattoos, or rather, in one huge tattoo, a colorful canvas that went all the way from the backs of both hands to the tips of both—
I jerked my eyes away.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
She snorted.
Before she could start making fun of me again, I asked, “Who are you? Are you…with Alex?”
She grunted. “Heh. No. It’d never work between us. We’re both tops.”
I cocked my head. “Tops of what?”
She froze for a moment, spoon halfway to her mouth. “My gods, you’re adorable. Do me a favour and start singing. I’ve always wanted to pet a chipmunk.”
My jaw tensed. “Just tell me your name.”
She took a deep breath, like she was about to do something unpleasant, and then said, “Riley Harper, at your service.”
I watched her—not too closely—and waited for more.
She paused. “You seriously don’t recognize me?”
“Should I?”
“Well, Snow White, maybe you would if you looked,” she said. “Come off it, are you a fucking nun? Honestly, like you’ve never seen tits before. Did they not have any mirrors at your convent?”
I considered going back upstairs, but I really wanted this coffee, and didn’t like my chances of juggling it and the IV stand up the staircase. “No, they didn’t.”
“Well that makes sense, because it sounds like it was under a rock.” She started slurping the milk from her bowl.
“Pretend it was,” I said. “Why should I know you?”
“Oh, I was in a band, it got pretty big,” she said airly, lowering her now empty bowl to the table. After a pause, she offhandedly said, “Also, I’m a supervillain.”
My jaw dropped and a bit more of my coffee splashed on the table.
Riley watched me, eyes mischievous, clearly enjoying the shock her words had caused.
My brain recontextualized the situation.
I was now no longer satisfying a biological coffee imperative in a dark kitchen with a weird, naked stranger—I was sitting across from a dangerous predator, with evidence of my weakness and vulnerability on a stand in a plastic bag next to me.
I drew in power, and suddenly the room was cast in shadow by the light that poured from me. I shoved my chair backwards, and rather than stand, I floated out of it.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
She yawned, seemingly unimpressed. “That’s all a bit much, innit?”
“Answer me,” I said, voice low. “Or this gets ugly.”
“It can’t be ugly,” Riley countered. “I’m here.” She looked me up and down. “And you’re not bad, frankly. Little skinny for me, but we could fatten you right up.”
I raised my hand and gathered power into my palm again. “Last chance.”
Riley looked past me, then smirked. “Well, now you’ve done it.”
My eyebrows furrowed. “Done wha—?”
A hand clamped down on my shoulder, and Alex said, an inch from my ear in a voice as hard as iron, “Knock it off and sit down.”
I felt the power drain out of me faster than I had gathered it, fast enough that it rattled dishes in the cabinets returning to the world. I floated down, and heard the chair scrape across linoleum as Alex pushed it back beneath me. I looked over my shoulder.
Alex stood over me, still in her costume, crusty-eyed, hair sticking out in every direction, and most importantly, grumpy.
I stammered, “A-Alex, she said—”
“I know what she said,” Alex growled. “She’s just trying to rile you up. Stop making it easy.” Her eyes swiveled to Riley. “For fuck’s sake, Riley.”
Riley smiled cherubically. “Problem?”
“Problem,” Alex confirmed. “Stop being a goddamn pain in the ass for once and go put some fucking clothes on.”
“You said I could dress how I wanted. Or not dress, as is the case.”
“When it’s just us,” Alex said. “Now it’s not. Seriously, go teach your grandmother to suck eggs, or whatever it is Brits do for fun. I need to talk to Anna.”
Riley made a face. “You’re really not using that expression the right—”
The blonde hero’s hair began to glow and rise up off her head. “Go.”
I felt the heat and leaned away.
Riley clicked her tongue. “Fine, I see how it is.” She leaned across the table conspiratorially, and I did my best not to look at—well. You get it by now. “Good luck, mate. She’s a right monster before she’s had her coffee.”
Then, to my surprise, Riley popped. Literally, popped like a balloon, complete with the noise. I felt air rush past me, blow my hair back, and she was gone without a trace.
Which apparently was par for the course. Alex let my shoulder go and trudged over to the coffee pot. She silently poured her cup with the purpose and determination of a soldier loading a gun, preparing to go over the top into no man’s land. As she did, her hair lost its glow and began to settle.
I was too intimidated to speak. This wasn’t the Alex I’d gotten used to. I really hoped it was just the lack of coffee, because my brain was screaming that she hated me and I was in danger and I needed to flee. I’d seen her fighting, I’d seen her furious—teehee—but I’d never seen her furious at me, and I really didn’t feel like that was something I could handle at the moment.
She brought her cup over and sat where Riley had been, inhaling over her cup, and letting her breath out slowly. That done, she took her first sip. A certain amount of tension left her then, but not all of it, or even most of it.
She smoldered at me. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
It was harder to look at her than it had been to look at Riley. “You…looked tired.”
“I am tired,” she said with a sigh. “It’s been a very long week full of stress and bad news. Have you eaten?”
I shook my head.
“Good. Don’t.” She took another sip. “You’re not supposed to eat until you’re rehydrated and slammed down a few multivitamins, otherwise you could get refeeding syndrome. Your body was depleted of vital nutrients and electrolytes, and if you try to eat anything right now, you could go into shock and die.”
“Oh.” I paused. “I feel okay. Surprisingly okay for, you know, after a robot fight.”
She sipped. “Yeah. We gave you a shot with a Medico. Apparently, that’ll do most of the heavy lifting and there’s probably nothing to worry about anyway, but just to be safe, you’re not supposed to consume anything except water and a few saltines for twenty-four hours.”
I shrugged. Not eating wasn’t exactly hard for me.
She sighed again. “Sorry, kid. I’ll be human in a little bit. Drink your coffee.”
I remembered my own cup in my hands and hesitated. “Should I do that? You just said I could die—?”
“I just said there’s probably nothing to worry about,” she snapped. “The doctors are just being cautious.”
I flinched at her tone, then sipped my coffee.
We sat in silence, in the dark, for several minutes before I finally worked up the courage to say something.
“Are you…mad at me?”
“No.”
I waited.
“Oh, don’t look at me all doe-eyed, kid.” She took a longer gulp of her coffee, now that it had cooled off. “I just need you to explain a couple things. Some…stuff has come up since you’ve been gone.”
“Do you know how long I was in there?”
“Six days, according to bill,” she said.
That blew my mind a little. I would have guessed a month.
“You’re doing alright?” she said, sounding non-grumpy for the first time since she’d woken up.
“Yeah, I said I was.”
“I don’t mean physically, I mean…”
“I’m good.”
“You weren’t so good last night.”
“That was last night.” I nursed my coffee. “I’m good at compartmentalization.”
“Well, we’ll see about that.” She huffed. “I wish we had more time, but things are going to start moving pretty quickly.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
She held up a hand. “First, I need a couple things from you.”
“Anything.” I meant it. I needed her to go back to being the Alex I knew.
She eyed me, then stood and left the kitchen.
She returned with Paragon’s cape neatly folded in her arms.
My heart leapt into my throat as she set it on the table in front of me and stood there, looking down on me, expression impassive.
“I need you to explain where you got this,” she said.
Her voice made me even more nervous. There was an implied “or else” at the end of it.
I tried to talk, but instead I found myself shrinking away from her.
She took a breath, then put a hand on my shoulder. “Anna. This is serious. I’m not trying to be a hardass. I know you’ve been through some things recently, but I need an answer before we do anything else. I need the truth.”
“He gave it to me,” I managed to say.
Her eyes narrowed. “Hyperion?”
“What? No. Paragon. Or, I mean, he left it at my house.”
“He was at your house? Why? Is that why he and Jason fought?”
I drew in a sharp breath. “Paragon and Jason fought?”
She searched my face for a few moments, giving away nothing, and then I saw her soften somewhat. She pulled her chair around to the side of the table and sat next to me. She said, “Tell me everything.”
And I did. Aside from my plan to rob the school, anyway. I just told her that Jason and I argued, and that’s why I was upset enough to go to Memorial Square.
She listened to the story of the night with minimal interruptions. Her only question was, “Did Paragon say why he was in the Skip?”
I nodded. “He said he was looking for a girl. He didn’t say why, just that he needed to find her before ‘the wrong people.’ He didn’t say who.”
Alex nodded and I finished the story.
At the end, she let out a sigh. “So the Liebowitzes are safe?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And the baby?”
“Safe.”
“And you didn’t see Paragon again?”
I shook my head. “Not before SCAR captured me. Before—” My voice hitched.
Alex put her arm around my shoulders and pulled me in for a hug. “I’m sorry, kid. Thank you for talking to me. I didn’t want to push you like that. I just needed to get a report in before noon or we were going to have people kicking down the door. And it needed to be a good one.”
I pressed my face against her collarbone, relieved that she wasn’t glaring at me anymore. I felt a bit of her emotions through the contact, and felt her own relief reflecting mine. “I don’t understand. What’s wrong?”
“Anna—” Her own breath caught. She shook a bit.
Alarm flared in my stomach as deep, deep grief welled up in her. “Alex?”
She cleared her throat. “Noah is dead. Jason murdered him.”
The words hung over the silence that followed.
I felt the world slipping away, the foundations of it crumbling. I’m not sure how to describe it without taking away from it. I had attacked Paragon, when my adrenaline was up and my emotions were raw, but he had proven to me afterwards to be the hero he had always been portrayed as. The hero he was supposed to be. What I had learned about him matched perfectly with the mythic defender of justice and truth, but also humanized him, made him more than a myth. It had confirmed a deeply held belief I’d held onto since I was a child, that heroes were, well, heroes, and that the good guys would win, and that this hero more than most would be there to make sure that happened. That belief had been tarnished, buried, but Paragon had uncovered it, pulled it closer to the surface. He’d given me something that I thought I’d lost forever.
And now Alex was saying that he was gone.
“No,” I whispered. “That’s not possible, it can’t—”
Then I realized how true the words I had just spoken were. Hyperion couldn’t defeat Paragon. It wasn’t possible. Hyperion was powerful, but Paragon was…Paragon.
I didn’t get the chance to object, though. I felt Alex trembling in my embrace. I felt something inside her tearing, something so much like what I felt, but with layers I couldn’t comprehend from the outside.
I looked up to her eyes. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
I was floored. I had seen her happy. I had seen her angry. I had seen her on the dance floor of Club Hellfire grinding on unsuspecting villains who didn’t recognize her, just for fun. But I had never before seen the pain I saw then.
“What is it?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.
“He’s—” A noise close to a sob escaped her throat before she bit down on the next words. “He was my husband. My ex. We were married for five years.”
Horror rose in me, and suddenly I was pulling her into a hug.
She cried on my shoulder. I cried on hers.
We stayed like that until the sun came up.