“It is with a heavy heart that I come to you today,” said the man on the floating television screen, sounding not very sad at all. He was a handsome, distinguished-looking looking man, similar enough in the face to Paragon to give away that they were related. “For a hundred years, our great nation has thrived under the aegis of Noah Tomorrow, the superhero Paragon. It is my harrowing duty today to inform you that is no longer true. Noah Tomorrow, my uncle, has been killed in the line of duty.”
The collective gasp and cries of shock that came from the assembled reporters cut off whatever he was about to say next. Despite his supposedly “heavy heart,” the man speaking looked more annoyed than anything. He waited for the noise to die down a bit, looking down his nose at the mass of people.
“Stupid, smug, whimpering little shitcunt,” Alex growled on the couch next to me, eyes nearly murderous. She was still dressed in her PJs, a cup of coffee forgotten in her hands.
“Friend of yours?” I asked. I wasn’t sure why, but it felt like a tension that needed to be relieved.
She gave me a glance that made me wish I hadn’t tried. “No.”
You hear it a lot, but all cliche aside, Alex really was a different person before she had her coffee.
I tried to huddle into the arm of the couch, but she—rather forcefully—grabbed my shoulder and hauled me in to cuddle. She was being very insistent on not letting me “turtle up” after last night, and also, I think she just needed to cuddle someone.
“Please,” said the shitcunt on TV. “Please, settle down. No questions at the moment. I’d like to tell you the circumstances but I’m not going to talk over you—”
“Who’s this twat?” Riley said, shambling into the room. She looked like—well, the phrase “death warmed over” came to mind, but it was a cliche, and wasn’t quite blunt enough. She looked like someone had microwaved a corpse. She was still wearing her second outfit from yesterday, albeit a much more rumpled and crusty version, and had added a pair of wide aviator sunglasses to the ensemble. She moved like she was ninety years old as she reached over, scrabbled blindly at the wall, and then managed to flip the light switch off, casting the room into dimness.
“Preston Tomorrow,” Alex said.
“He’s the one you hate, yeah?” Riley asked, plopping into the easy chair to the side.
“Oh, I don’t just hate one of them,” Alex said. “The whole family is despicable.”
We watched the broadcast for a little while, but it became clear that Preston Tomorrow was a master of talking a lot and saying nothing. By the time we were ten minutes in, I didn’t know anything more than what I had already learned from Alex. If I had been watching it cold, I’d probably be wondering if I had misheard him say that Paragon was dead in the first place.
When I asked Alex about it, she scowled. “It’s all corporate-speak, Anna. It’s not about communicating a message, it’s about saying nothing and having all of your bases covered. Noah would hate it.” Her eyebrows furrowed, and she leaned forward and rubbed her temples. “And it’s giving me a fucking headache. TV off.”
The floating, boxless TV screen blinked into nonexistence, and we all sat in the dark living room, quiet.
Until Riley asked, “Hey, Alex, why are you poor?”
“I’m not poor,” Alex said. “I make six figures.”
“Sure, but you were married to the richest man on the planet, yeah?” She looked around. “You’re basically living in a gutter now.”
“A spacious Downtown condo is a gutter?”
“Relatively speaking,” she said. “To, you know, the family of literal trillionaires. They couldn’t toss you a spare billion they had in the couch cushions? What’d you even get in the divorce?”
“Harper.”
“I’m just asking, mate,” Riley said. “Seems a bit odd is all.”
“I didn’t get anything,” Alex snapped. “I didn’t want anything. I’d just spent five years being called a gold-digging slut by pretty much everyone—the media, his family, hell, my family. They were all waiting for the payout, fucking leeches.”
“Your holidays sound like fun,” Riley noted, eyebrows raising behind her aviators.
Alex leaned back and sighed. “How’s the hangover, Riley?”
Riley gave a sickly grin. “Dreadful. I’m sober long enough to be hungover.” She pointed her lenses in my direction. “Never go to rehab, no matter what they tell you. Scrooge McDuck yourself into a mountain of cocaine and never come back up for air.”
“I’ll try to remember that if it’s ever relevant to my life,” I said.
She chuckled. “Not bad, Snow. Stiff and stilted, but dry and subtle.”
“I’m gonna go start breakfast,” Alex said, hauling herself to her feet. She paused for a moment, looked at Riley, then at me, and then glared at Riley.
The blue-haired girl raised her hands. “Fucking hell, I’ll play nice, I promise.”
Alex let her glare linger long enough to make her point, then left the room.
Riley leaned back in her chair and let out a sigh mixed relief and pain that made me promise myself that I’d never, ever drink, and then I told Alex’s videogame console to turn on and put on the little headband. I didn’t think that people who could afford toys like this actually appreciated them, but I was determined to get as much skeleton-smashing in as I could in the week I had.
“So Alex shot you down, huh?” Riley asked casually as the console fired up.
I nearly choked. “Excuse me?”
“Excuse me?” she mimicked, making me sound shrill and uptight.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said coldly before sitting back on the couch and focusing on the startup screen. T-Tech Software presents, the Metabox, it said, with a stylized M-logo flashed across my vision.
She snorted. “I’m talking about your obvious puppydog crush. I’m talking Alex coddling your feelings like you’re made of porcelain. I’m talking about her walking out of your bedroom this morning.”
“Nothing happened,” I snapped.
“Oh believe me, I wasn’t ever under the delusion that anything had,” she said. “If she won’t fuck me, she’s definitely not going to fuck you. And that’s not an insult, it’s an age thing. You’re at least a couple years younger than me, and I’m being very generous assuming you’re at least of age for uni.”
“I’m eighteen,” I said, hearing the defensiveness in my own voice and hating it. “I’m an adult.”
Riley started at me for a moment, then began to tremble, before bubbling, low laughter boiled up from her stomach. “Oh, you’re precious, Snow White.”
“Fine,” I said, seething. “I’ve been taking care of myself for two years in the Skip. I’ve fought more supervillains than most superheroes, masterminded a gang war, and escaped from prison. Also, I died once. Am I mature enough yet?”
“Not for Alex, apparently,” she said.
I did my best not to launch the controller that was suddenly in my hand at her head, because it was an insubstantial digital projection and that would have been foolish. Instead, I opted to ignore her, and turn to the menu that would select the game I wanted to play.
“You know,” she said, after a few moments, “I died once.”
I tilted my head slightly, listening.
“I was sixteen,” Riley said. “It was our first trip back to the UK since the Dark Veil lifted. The show at Wembley. Light Aid, they called it, the cheeky buggers. I always thought it was funny—we spend four years fighting demons and then one of the first things we do when we win is run a benefit concert for you Yanks. Anyway, we were in the back partying. They didn’t care that we were teenagers. We were rockstars, and so were most of the people we were partying with.”
I actually did remember something about this concert. There had been this big discourse about whether or not we, as Americans, should feel grateful or insulted that we were being offered international aid. There was a large contingent that felt that the rest of the world was only doing it as an insult, gleefully basking in the schadenfreude of our “momentary difficulties,” and that we should take all of the money they sent and burn it.
As far as I was aware, that didn’t happen, but then, I never saw any of the cash that was supposed to help struggling families, either, so who knew where it went in the end.
I started smashing skeletons, but listened to Riley as she spoke.
“My drug of choice at the time was cocaine, and mostly for productivity reasons,” she continued. “Sometimes adderall, but I hated the dry mouth, and pills are hard to come by since the technophage. Believe it or not, I was a little workaholic back in the day. I didn’t even really like partying back then, especially this type of partying, but Amber—our vocalist, I forgot, you’re uncultured—convinced me it was ‘networking,’ so I went along with it. Anyway, our set was suppose to start in ten minutes, and then Larry Flairs—yeah, from the boy band—offered me a speedball. Just, casually. Here, snort this line. Heroin and coke. It’ll be the best high you’ve ever had. All the good, none of the bad. You’ll play like a goddess. I wasn’t gonna, but then Amber did, so I thought, what the hell, for the music.” She chuckled humorlessly. “Five minutes later, my heart stopped beating, and I was clinically dead for three minutes. Two minutes after they revived me, they pushed me out on stage, and I played better than I ever had in my life. And I’m a really, really good musician normally.”
I stared at her, open-mouthed forgetting about the skeletons. After a few moments, I realized I should say something. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
She drew back a bit, as if startled. “Are you kidding? Did you not hear the end? I played better than ever. It was the time of my fucking life.” She sighed wistfully. “Ah, but those really were the good old days.”
“You nearly died.”
“I did die, clinically. But I lived way harder.”
I frowned at her. “Is this the part where you pull out a baggie and tell me the first hit is free?”
Riley snorted. “No, Snow White. Believe it or not, I never figured you for the type.”
“What type is that?”
“Cool.”
I watched her. I realized my body felt warm, like the moments right before it breaks into a sweat, and my throat was tight. There was a pressure around my eyes, like they were straining to hold back tears. The sensation was strange in how familiar it felt, and then it hit me—it was exactly the same thing I used to feel when I was being bullied.
It had been such a long time since I’d felt it that I didn’t know what to do. It hadn’t been something I’d had to deal with since my powers had awoken—I’d learned a method to deal with it, and that method was gratuitous violence. But if I tried that in Alex’s house, she’d be, at the very least, upset with me.
But if I had learned anything at all, it was that you didn’t let things like that go unanswered.
“You’re an idiot,” I said.
She tilted her head. “Well you aren’t afraid to say what’s on your mind, are you? Why am I an idiot?”
“Because only an idiot could be completely safe and find a way to die.” The videogame continued mostly forgotten, and I paid no attention as my character was mercilessly hacked to death.
Riley made a face and flicked her fingers dismissively. “And why is ‘safety’ the end goal here? How boring is that?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said flatly.
“Well here’s what I know, Snow White,” Riley said. “If surviving is your only objective, bad news—everyone dies. You’re already a failure. But you know what you can do? Be fucking ace before you go. Live a life worth remembering. We’re all defined by our proximity to death, and how we get there, so why not do it on your own terms? Go out in a blaze of glory riding a motherfucking laser tiger into the stars, or high enough to think you were, at any rate. Scream your name into the empty void loud enough that the stars cower in fear, challenge death to a game of chicken, and change history—because that’s the only way any of us live on, in the end.”
“Except they don’t,” I said, turning back to my game. “They just die, and then they’re dead. They can’t change anything after that. The world moves on. Nothing beside remains.”
Riley threw her head back theatrically. “God, not only are you a drag, but you’re pretentious. Alex made a huge mistake. You need to get laid in the worst way.”
I felt my cheeks flush and decided verbally jousting with her was pointless. Riley Harper didn’t seem like the type of person who could be swayed, stymied, or hurt by words. They just rolled off of her, repelled by pure ego. I decided to ignore her.
We sat in silence for a little while longer, before Riley offered, “You’re pretty good at this game, though.”
“I’m good at most things,” I said, short. I heard her start to chortle, then turned and squinted in her direction. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said, chuckling, seemingly delighted. “I just…can’t wait until you get to school. They’re going to love you.”
----------------------------------------
The agenda for that day was shopping.
I needed clothes and school supplies, Alex said, and she refused to acknowledge my weak objections. To be honest, I had no idea what I was objecting to. She was correct. I needed stuff. The fact that I had no money meant that Alex would have to buy it. And for some reason, that made me feel deeply ashamed, which I knew was both stupid and pointless.
The cool thing about growing up poor is that you realize that pride is a luxury that costs exactly as much as all the things you need and can’t actually afford. When you pick your clothes not based on what you like or what’s comfortable, but how big the holes are before they’re considered criminally indecent, then you’ll begin to understand.
Still. Mixed feelings aside, I was excited. In all my years living in Sanctum City, I had never set foot off of the mainland, onto the islands—aside from the Skip, I mean. I had certainly never been Downtown, and Alex’s condo wasn’t just Downtown, it was a hundred floors up in the what was called the Jungle, interior of the nest of starscrapers, accessible only via a starscraper’s interior, or by the gondola lifts that serviced the skyways.
Just walking out the door was its own special moment for me. It took my breath away.
At first.
All around us, above us, below us, the gold and glass glittered, with people—thousands of them—moving through intricate, luxurious, architectural splendor like it was mundane, pedestrian. Every building was a work of art, intricately designed and decorated on every level to be appreciated, every block a tapestry of history. There was nothing functional or minimal about it. Steam vents pumped warm moisture into the air, light sources both artificial and natural giving everything a glowing yellow haze, not like a smog, but like an aura, as effervescent and magical. A rigid-bodied, tube-shaped, steampowered public transit dirigible floated by overhead and nobody even glanced at it.
Sanctum City’s design had been influenced in numerous ways throughout the years, first constructed as the steam-powered dream of a mad engineer, then reimagined as the art deco vision of the Roaring Twenties, before becoming the nexus point of the esoteric by the blossoming paranatural community, and finally, in the biggest explosion of growth, the codifier of Streamline Moderne as it became “The City of the Future.”
I tried not to gawk like a tourist, but it was hard. I’d almost expected to be disappointed, because surely nothing in real life could be as beautiful as it looked on TV, but in actuality, real life was better, and not just because my TV had been an old CRT with bunny ears and a built-in VCR. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a thousand pictures couldn’t have captured what was so special about Downtown in person. In motion. With all the depth and noise and character. It even smelled good, the air crisp with the remnant breeze coming off the lake and none of the more egregious city-smells I’d grown up with.
It was so glorious that I barely realized I was furious.
I didn’t even really know why, just yet. I kept thinking, How dare they?
We took one of the gondolas down a level, which I expected to be darker, but wasn’t. It was perfectly lit, enough to be bright but not blinding. The midlevels of the Skip were some of the darkest places I’d ever been, far away from the ambient rooftop glow of the rest of the city and lacking the dim but ever-burning chemlights of street level. Prime territory for Hunters.
No Hunters were in evidence here.
It was a short walk to the nearest hanging rail station, which was a building shaped vaguely like a huge, retro-futuristic rocketship with a turnstile blocking the entrance. I had a brief panic attack as I realized I no longer had a bus pass—or technically a metro pass, I guess, but I’d only ever used it for the bus—but Alex swiped hers twice, and we both went through.
Riley—who had decided to join us for reasons I couldn’t fathom, despite still looking half-dead—just popped and teleported to the other side, which didn’t draw nearly as much attention as I would have expected. On my side of the tracks, using powers in public was a more surefire way to get the cops to show up than calling them. Never mind casually using them to break the law.
Nobody even glanced sideways at her. There was no sudden psychic, emotional jolt of surprise or fear from the people around me. Nothing.
I felt my fists clenching.
We waited for a railcar to pull up to the station, and not very long. A light started flashing, and barricades sprang up along a pair of striped lines that had “RAIL LANE - STAND CLEAR” written between them. Hanging from the track by its magnetic sleeve, the car glided into the station in front of us, between the barriers, looking something like a cross between one of the gondolas we’d just taken and an old luxury streamliner. It came to an easy stop, and the barricades lowered. The doors on the cart opened, and people began flowing in one side and out the other. It was a remarkably smooth process, nothing like the old subway in—
We took seats near the front of the car, which were arranged like bus seats. I watched a pair of attendants quickly and efficiently help an older passenger into a handicap-accessible space, and within fifteen seconds the doors were shutting and we were accelerating.
I watched out the window as, with remarkable speed, we cleared the station and swept out into the open air, hundreds of feet above the ground—or rather, above the webwork of skyways and suspended plazas a tier below us, through which the ground was only ever barely glimpsed, it too full of happy, comfortable people living happy, comfortable lives.
While, less than five miles away, one of the biggest humanitarian crises of all time was quickly spiraling into a full blown disaster and possible genocide.
The ride was so smooth that if you closed your eyes, you wouldn’t even be able to tell you were moving, with the possible exception of the one descent of our route. Even then, the car was articulated, so it swiveled and we stayed level, only the slightest hint of weightlessness tickling my stomach.
I watched the couple across the aisle from us. They were young—older than me, but they seemed younger—holding some kind of ultratech touchscreen device between them, flicking it rapidly, passing the ride with a friendly game of…whatever. They looked happy, carefree, totally in love and comfortable with it.
We pulled up to a plaza a few miles from where we had started and disembarked just as efficiently as we had loaded. I watched the couple disappear into the crowd and golden haze, holding hands, fingers intertwined.
“At least the trains run on time,” I said, unable to keep the edge out of my voice.
Alex’s hand settled on my back.
I pulled away from it, and didn’t look at her as I stalked towards the exit.
The outside of this station was just as opulent as the other—in fact it was nearly identical, just as clean and artistically pleasing as the last. There was a busker here, though, a short man with a ukelele and a bin neatly labeled “Crisis Relief Donations.” And he played well. People quickly and readily dropped money, change by the handful, into his bin.
I wanted to kick it off the edge of the fucking skyway.
Not that I could. The whole thing was so safe you’d need to be a metahuman to jump over the fifty fences and barriers to do it in the first place.
The mall was just a short walk from the station, less than a block. The entrance, like so many entrances in Downtown, was through a door on the side of a starscraper, which still felt surreal, knowing how high we were. I expected it to be busier than it was.
Then we stepped through the door, and saw it was plenty busy.
It was a vertical mall, the stories lining floors around an empty central shaft, staircases and elevators and littler gondolas ferrying people from floor to floor. A waterfall steamed in the empty shaft, water plunging down a hundred feet into a basin, where presumably it was pumped all the way back to the top to make the circuit again. There were, in the small section of the mall we could see, hundreds of stores, mostly little outlets, and thousands of people. Our entrance wasn’t busy because there were more entrances at multiple points corresponding to every tier of the skyways, but the inside of the mall reminded me of an insect hive, all of the surface roiling with swarms of humanity packed into a relatively small space, spending all of their hard-earned money on useless crap.
Alex walked up beside me. She didn’t touch me this time. “Breathe, kid. You’re glowing.”
I blinked, looked down, and realized she was correct. Wisps of light had begun to rise from my skin, preceding the streams of energy that usually manifested between psionic nexuses, power flowing into me purely in response to my simmering rage. I felt myself start to tremble with the effort of keeping it inside.
“Breathe,” she repeated calmly. “In and out. Count them, to ten.”
I did as she said, forcing air into my lungs and out again, counting off a number in my head as I went. I realized I had slightly mischaracterized what I was feeling. It wasn’t just rage. It was pain. My eyes began to water.
“How dare they?” I said quietly, unevenly, to Alex. “How dare they live like this?”
“They’re just people, Anna,” she answered. “They’re living their lives.”
“So was I,” I said. “What did I do to get stuck where I was?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You didn’t do anything. The universe is random and cruel, and people are products of their environment. Including these people.”
I took a few more breaths and wiped my eyes. “What are they doing? Why aren’t they helping?”
“They’ve got bills to pay,” Alex said. “Movies to watch. Books to read. Is it right? I don’t know. But I do know that even the people who do help can’t do it all the time, kid. It’s just not how people are wired.”
I felt the rage and pain flood out of me suddenly, leaving me exhausted. My silly, wasted day of relaxation ran through my head. “Why aren’t I helping?”
“You are.” Alex came around and faced me, looking me in the eyes. “You’re going to help more than anyone. Go to school, play their game, and be the best superhero you can be. Do that, and you can make the universe a little less random, a little less cruel.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“I don’t know if I can.” I shut my eyes and shook my head. “I hate them, Alex. I don’t think I’m the right person for this.”
“Of course you are,” she said. “You’re the only person. That anger you feel is exactly why. You’re not going to let anybody forget. You’re not going to let them go on like nothing is wrong. You’re going to hold their feet to the fire. Just don’t forget, in a lot of ways, they’re victims too. We all are.”
“Most comfortable victims I’ve ever seen,” I muttered.
“You know, I live here too,” Alex said dryly. “Do you hate me?”
I felt my cheeks warm up. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know, kid,” she said, laying a hand on my shoulder. “I know. Now let’s go buy you some underwear.”
I snorted. “Sorry. I’m being stupid.”
“It’s not stupid to have feelings,” Alex said. “Just make sure they’re pointed in the right direction. There are a lot of people who would benefit from knowing your anger, whether it be as motivation or…something more tactile. Either way, don’t let them off easy.”
I nodded, and she gave my shoulder a squeeze.
She led us deeper into the mall, and I tried my best not to loathe the people around me. They scurried into and out of little outlets, toting their bags of waste, which is the only way I could think of it. How many meals could the people in this one section of this one mall send to the Skip with the money they’d otherwise spend on frivolous crap? How much medicine? How many blankets?
Why did they get all of this when we were forced to fight for scraps?
“Consumerist as hell, isn’t it?” Riley said beside me, making me jump. I’d forgotten she was there.
I watched her carefully. She looked out over the mass of endless consumption, expression—and most of her face, actually—hidden by her massive aviators.
“It’s different,” I said slowly. “From how I grew up. And where I’ve been.”
“Why are you always so guarded?” she asked. “You can say it. It’s bullshit. Fuck all of these people.”
I didn’t say it, but I didn’t trip over myself to disagree either.
Riley looked at Alex, walking in front of us. She put a hand on my shoulder, drawing me to a slower pace, letting the older woman get a little bit ahead of us.
I waited for her to talk, confused.
“I think I know a place that’s a little more your speed,” Riley said, voice quiet and sly. To my questioning look, she added, “Full of more like-minded people.”
I narrowed my eyes suspiciously.
“Stay awake tonight,” she said. “Until then, relax. Enjoy the views. Stop walking like you’ve got a something shoved up your bum.” She paused. “Unless you want—”
I yanked my shoulder away from her and quickened my pace to catch up with Alex.
Riley chuckled behind me. “Gods, you’re easy.”
----------------------------------------
Shopping went about as well as could be expected.
I was used to thrift stores or, at best, big box stores with extensive clearance sections. This store did not have an extensive clearance section. It didn’t have any clearance section. It had subdued mood lighting. It had a pleasant, helpful staff who didn’t blink twice at the ill-fitting, borrowed outfit I was currently wearing. It had very few price tags that weren’t in the triple digits.
I tried desperately to convince Alex to go somewhere less ritzy, even just the JCPenny’s we’d seen on our way here—a store that I’d seen my mother eye wistfully on our way to Goodwill—but she’d apparently gone conveniently deaf.
The mystery of Riley’s presence solved itself as she immediately broke off to hit on one of the saleswomen—apparently clothing boutiques were prime hunting grounds for hungover lesbians. I suspected that, if she really was as famous as she seemed to think, there weren’t many places she couldn’t pick someone up, but here, she’d see them basically as groomed and stylish as they could possibly be. It was smart, if you had the same sexual instincts as a hyena.
Alex made me try on clothes, which at first I thought would be a problem, given the mirrors in the dressing rooms, but conveniently, they were all obscured by a layer of frost when I went in.
“That looks good, kid,” she said, as I came out in a purple scoop neck blouse that I instinctively wanted to hike up. “Classy, but casual.”
I looked down, lips puckering in distaste, and grabbed a fistful of fabric on the front. “It’s kind of loose.”
“You’ll grow into it,” she said. “Aurora’s going to put some muscle on you, if nothing else. In a couple months, it’ll be tight, I promise. What do you think?”
I thought that it looked awful. I thought that everything she picked looked awful. I thought that if you had a team of fashion designers and tailors all put their heads together and design the perfect outfit, it would still look awful. Something Judith had said once upon a time kept repeating in my head—you can put lipstick on a pig, but you can’t make her less of a revolting gutter slut.
She was a font of wit, that Judith.
But I shrugged and said, “It’s okay.”
“It’s beautiful,” Alex insisted, before loading my arms up with another outfit. “Now let me see these.”
I took it, then looked over and saw Riley, leaning across the counter, saying something covert to the saleslady she had singled out. The girl was pretty, and even prettier when she burst into giggles, her face turning pink. Her eyelashes literally fluttered as she looked deep into Riley’s…gigantic aviators. Riley was still wearing her crusty outfit from the previous day. She looked as out of place in a store like this as a weed in a wedding bouquet, but it didn’t seem to matter.
I glanced at Alex, who was shifting through the small rack where she’d hung most of the tops, already deciding how she was going to dress me up next. Not that it mattered. Lipstick on a pig.
She glanced over at me, eyes concerned. “Anna?”
I ducked into the dressing room.
----------------------------------------
The rest of the trip was uneventful. The school supplies I needed turned out to look a lot like the ones I’d needed for high school. Alex wanted to stock me up—apparently, buying them from the stores on campus was a recipe for poverty. She also—again ignoring my protests—bought me a set of high-end art supplies. She wanted me to take up drawing again. I had no desire, but promising vaguely to do so appeased her. After that, she tried to get me to buy stuff for my dorm. At first I assumed that meant practical things, blankets, pillows, possibly bear spray, but she steered us into a Spencer’s and I realized I was supposed to buy posters and novelty crap. I walked out with a picture of a dragon and a coffee mug that proclaimed me a “Badass Bitch.” Alex, meanwhile, bought a sex toy shaped like an octopus tentacle and threatened to beat me with it if I didn’t buy something fun. It took me several moments to realize she was joking.
Riley ditched us for that one. Apparently being seen in a Spencer’s would be the end of her street cred.
We met back up in the food court, where we got some firmly mid-range gyros. I ate slowly, praying it would stay down—and froze.
My head snapped up and scanned the crowd, people milling about, waiting for or eating their own mediocre food. “Someone’s watching us.”
Riley turned her head, suddenly irritated. “Paparazzi? Annoying gits finally found me.”
I shook my head, “No.” I kept scanning, as much with my mind as my eyes, then saw the flash of motion of someone who realized they’d been clocked and needed to rabbit. I began to stand.
Alex’s hand clamped on my shoulder and she pushed me back down. “It’s fine.”
“Alex, someone is—”
“Lots of someones are,” Alex said, seeming irritated. “And they’re supposed to be fucking professionals, but I guess that was too much to ask.”
I blinked at her.
She sighed and put down her gyro. “Lots of people have a vested interest in making sure you get to school safe and sound, kid.”
I frowned. “And…in making sure everyone else is safe and sound.”
“Part and parcel.”
“How long have they been there?” I demanded.
“They’ve been watching the house since I rescued you,” she said placidly. “It’s not a big deal.”
“If it’s not a big deal, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t tell you because it’s not a big deal. We’ve got a couple shadows.” She gave me a direct look. “Did you expect anything less?”
I felt my jaw tighten. “What if it’s SCAR?”
She scoffed. “It’s not SCAR, kid. Our people are better than theirs.”
My eyes narrowed. “‘Our?’”
“Yes,” she said. “The group I work for. Which is soon to have several agents heading to retraining.”
I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t elaborate, so I said, “You don’t trust me.”
“Anna,” she said, not quite able to stop herself from snapping. “If I didn’t trust you, you’d still be in the Skip. Don’t be stupid.”
I felt my breath hitch, my response strangling itself in my throat.
“Lay off, mate,” Riley said. “She’s sketchy about Big Brother going through her knickers. Perfectly sensible.”
It took me a moment to realize she was taking my side.
Alex gave her an irritated glance, then slipped a hand over to rest on mine. “Anna, listen, it’s okay—”
I jerked my arm away and looked at my lap.
She paused, then her face fell. “Kid. Come on. You’re not stupid. You know that. I didn’t mean to snap.”
My stupid lip started to tremble, so I sucked it between my teeth.
“Oh, is that what she’s upset about?” Riley said, sounding mildly outraged. “In that case, toughen up, Snow White. They’re gonna eat you alive if you walk into school that thin-skinned.”
Well. That had been too good to last, apparently.
“Riley, shut up,” Alex said. She leaned in and laid her hand on the table. “Anna. You know I didn’t mean that.”
After a second, I nodded. I didn’t take her hand though.
“But seriously,” Riley said. “If you can’t even go to the mall without some kind of emotional crisis, Aurora is gonna eat you alive.”
“How would you know?” Alex snapped. “Didn’t you brag for months about not knowing anything about the school except that it was a, quote, ‘never-ending pussy buffet?’”
“Couldn’t tell you about most of the classes,” Riley allowed. “But I know people, and those Heroforge kids are sharks.”
“No, they’re not,” Alex snapped. “They’re dedicated and hard-working. Just because you didn’t fit in doesn’t mean Anna won’t.”
“You know, you’ve done nothing but bitch at me since she got here,” Riley complained. “I’m just trying to prepare the poor girl.”
“You’re trying to psyche her out because you like messing with people,” Alex said. “And you’re starting to piss me off.”
“Oh, starting to? Well I’d hate to see you actually miffed.”
Alex stared at her. “Just keep talking. You will.”
Riley rolled her eyes, then abruptly stood. “Right, well, I got what I came here for. You two have fun with the rest of your day.” After a pause, she added. “And Alex, for God’s sake, just throw the girl a pity fuck.”
Alex’s eyes flashed, and I saw a band of fire briefly flow through her hair, but before she could respond, Riley popped, a breeze swept through the food court, and she was gone.
We sat in silence for a few moments.
“So, the people following us,” I said quietly. “They’re…safe?”
“More than that,” Alex said. “They’re making sure we’re safe. Keeping vultures from circling too closely.”
“Are they listening to us?”
“No. Or if they are, heads are gonna roll.”
“You work for them?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t elaborate.
The silence stretched again.
“I’m sorry, kid,” she said, and I knew she wasn’t just talking about her slip of the tongue anymore.
I nodded, staring at my partially eaten gyro. Then, tentatively, I asked, “What if…I were older?”
Alex sighed. “Don’t. Hypotheticals are how introverts disguise masochism. The situation is what it is. I love you, but not in that way. Don’t let something that isn’t poison something you have.”
I shut my eyes and breathed. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” she repeated, like she had the previous night.
We said nothing for a little while again, and I risked a little more of the gyro. They were better than I’d initially given them credit for.
“Riley is…unpleasant,” I finally said.
“She’s performing,” Alex said tiredly. “And frustrated, because her performance isn’t working like it usually does.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Normally when pretty girls are around, she thinks she can crook her finger and they’ll fall into bed with her,” Alex said. “And it’s true more often than not. She’s not used to failure.”
“So, really wants to sleep with you, and she doesn’t like how…close you and I are?” I asked.
Alex’s eyebrows raised. “It’s not me she’s after right now, kid.”
I looked at her, uncomprehending for an embarrassingly long period of time.
Then I realized.
“She’s hitting on me?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“Yeah.”
I blinked. “Why?”
Alex looked at me like I was…not smart. “Because you’re pretty, Anna.”
I looked at her like she was…also not smart.
“Kid, I’m not going to try to break your self-esteem issues all at once,” Alex said. “But Harper sees what she sees, and her only real concern is getting a taste of it.”
I had no idea what to say to that.
----------------------------------------
We spent the rest of the day at the mall and got home late, arms loaded with bags—ludicrously so, in fact. In addition to school supplies and clothes, Alex had taken me to a bookstore, a comics outlet, and a game hop, and I’d stopped complaining about how much money she was spending. It was pretty clear it wasn’t just me she was trying to make happy.
Riley was nowhere to be seen, and I was fine with that. I hadn’t really liked spending time around her before Alex had told me what she was after, and after, I couldn’t imagine anything more uncomfortable.
I spent the rest of the evening reading, and Alex fielded apparently a few dozen calls that had been left on her answering machine while we were out. From the little I overheard before I tuned it out, it sounded like a lot of reporters asking for comments about Paragon’s death. I was surprised she didn’t just tell them all to go fuck themselves, but I got the feeling that’s what she wanted to do.
When bedtime rolled around, I didn’t ask Alex to stay with me, though I got the feeling she would have, and maybe even wanted to. I definitely wanted her too—I didn’t wake up screaming when she was there—but also, I couldn’t imagine anything more agonizing than laying in bed next to her right then. And considering the wealth of agony I had to draw on, that was saying something.
So, for the first time since I’d broken out of prison, I climbed into bed and started to fall asleep alone.
“Hey, Snow White, wake up,” a voice said from the darkness.
I bolted upright, drawing power into the palm of my hand, and aiming it in the direction of the voice.
The light shining from my palm revealed Riley standing next to my bed, finally in a new set of clothes. This outfit was certainly…more than the last, skintight leather pants, and a loose black muscle shirt ripped on the sides almost down all the way down to the hem, leaving most of her on display if she leaned slightly forward. Spiked wristbands glinted in the light of my blast. Something about her face was different as well, and then I realized she was wearing a significant amount of makeup.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, sleepily alarmed, my hand not lowering.
“Remember, I said I’d take you somewhere more your speed?” she said, like it was perfectly normal to appear in someone’s bedroom at midnight and have a telekinetic blasted pointed in your direction. “Well, get dressed.”
“What? No. Why would I go anywhere with you?”
She snorted. “Because you’re a proactive person and you want to see something less sterile and safe from the city. Because you’re curious. Because you kicked Alex out of your room tonight so you could have space.” She spread her arms. “Well, let’s go get some space. Forget all about her for a couple hours. I’m trying to help you out, Snow.”
I stared at her, eyes narrowing.
She rolled her eyes. “Or blast me, I guess.”
I knew that I should tell her to get out, and then go back to bed. But I thought about my reaction to the city earlier, and my complicated feelings around Alex. I pretty much knew at that point going back to sleep wasn’t an option. Of course, that didn’t mean that I should go anywhere with Riley but…I was curious. Not just about what she wanted to show me, but about Riley herself. I wasn’t convinced Alex was entirely correct, but at the very least, I wanted to know if Riley was an enemy or not.
And, again, I was just curious.
I threw the covers back and wiggled over to the edge of the bed.
Then I looked at Riley and waited.
She blinked. “What?”
“Get out,” I hissed. “So I can get dressed.”
“Oh, right.” She paused. “Unless you need a hand—”
“Out.”
“Fine,” she sighed. “Wear something nice.”
She disappeared with a pop.
I got dressed in some of the more normal clothes Alex had bought me—she’d wanted me to be dressed like a runway model seven days of the week, and I’d managed to haggle her down to business casual—then cautiously stepped out into the hallway. I didn’t want to wake Alex up. I was pretty sure whatever RIley wanted to show me was probably not government-approved.
A quick mental scan told me Riley was waiting in the foyer, so I tiptoed down the stairs to meet her.
She looked me up and down as I descended, lips twisting skeptically. “By ‘nice,’ I meant ‘sexy.’ I thought that was implicit.”
“I don’t own anything sexy,” I said flatly, which wasn’t completely true. Alex had thrown some stuff in the bags that probably qualified, but I was determined that they’d never see the light of day. “If you’re taking me somewhere weird, I—”
“Relax, it’s a bar.”
I frowned. “I don’t want to go to a bar.”
“You’ll want to come to this one,” Riley said. “Trust me.”
“No.”
“Then bloody hell, go back upstairs, I’ll go by myself.” She turned towards the door.
“Wait,” I said.
She stopped, and looked back at me.
“The people watching the house,” I said. “How are you going to get past them?”
She blinked at me. “I can teleport, Snow.”
“Can you teleport me too?”
She smiled slightly and held out her hand. “Let’s see.”
I hesitated.
She waited.
I took her hand.
We popped.
It was different from how Voidwalker did it—very different. I, weirdly, felt no physical change, but at the same time, everything about my perceptions shifted. It was like suddenly I had a million eyes staring in every direction, like I was suddenly weightless, like i was suddenly the air itself, shifting with the current. I was a billion little Annas, and immediately I felt them being pulled towards something far in the distance, and I moved with speed that should have killed me even with all of the intrakinetic power I could muster. It didn’t.
The world flashed by too quickly for me to comprehend. I tried to focus on bits of it but every time I started to, it was like the pull redoubled.
“Stop wiggling,” came Riley’s very discernable voice from nothingness. “You’re making this difficult.”
“Are we…air?”
“Yes.”
“Can I change back?”
“You will if you don’t go with the flow, and I mean that literally,” Riley said. “So unless you want to rematerialize a thousand feet in the air, stop pulling against me.”
I realized it was my focus that was tripping her up. I did my best to avoid looking at anything, but I realized that I was unable to close my eyes, since they didn’t technically exist at the moment.
We blew through the city on a breeze, and then all at once, the ride came to an end, and I felt only the tiniest jolt as our bodies flashed back into physicality, though my mind spun for a few seconds as I got used to only looking out of two human eyes again.
We were on a sidewalk. We weren’t in Downtown’s Jungle, the mid-layers, anymore. We were in the Roots. The ground-level.
I expected it to be darker, both because it was night and we were beneath a couple dozen layers of skyways and starscrapers, but aside from maybe a trickle less ambient light, it still could have been daylight anywhere else in the world and it would be hard to tell the difference.
There was a small difference in the environment, at least. It was a little less polished, a little less clean, a bit more like what I recognized as a city. The few people out at this hour still walked mostly unafraid, though—where I was from, being out this late was a great way to get mugged.
Riley took my arm and pulled me along.
I jerked away from her. “This is…more normal, but it’s still—”
“Hold on,” she growled. She came to the mouth of an alleyway and peered down it.
To my surprise, there was a short squeal, and then a woman appeared. She was pretty, dressed…provocatively, in a hot pink top with a neckline that dove to her navel, and shorts that were so short the pockets bulged out from beneath them. It took me a few moments to realize that it was the saleswoman from the boutique.
“You came!” she breathed to Riley, eyes alight with near fawning adoration. Which abruptly died when she saw me. “Oh, I didn’t realize you brought a…friend.”
“Oh, don’t worry, love, I’m just taking her on a tour of the city,” Riley purred, moving forward. She, rather firmly, slipped her hand behind the other girl’s head, made a fist in her hair, and tilted her face up. What happened next was less of a kiss and more of a tonsillectomy via tongue.
That seemed to alleviate all of the woman’s worries regarding me. When they came back up for air, it was like I wasn’t even there.
I now firmly wished I wasn’t.
Riley drew away from her lazily, hooded eyes turning towards me. “Anna, this is Carly. Carly, Anna.”
“Uh, Carmen,” the girl said breathlessly, eyes glazed with lust, not appearing to care that much what her name was at that moment.
“Right,” Riley cooed. “My little carmel treat.”
The saleswoman giggled.
I stared. “Riley, what are you trying to—”
“Relax,” Riley said. “We’re almost there.” To Carmen, she asked, “Are you ready to go, love?”
The woman nodded eagerly. “I didn’t think there was a club around here.”
“It’s exclusive,” Riley said. “You have to know someone to get in.”
Carmen looked excited. “Like, for famous people?”
“Something like that,” Riley affirmed, vague. She looked at me. “You still good?”
I considered flying back to Alex’s house.
“Come on,” Riley cajoled. “If you don’t like it, I’ll take you home, and spend the rest of the night with Carly.”
“Carmen,” the saleswoman said again, looking very much like she hoped I wasn’t still good.
I sighed. “Fine, but this had better be quick, Riley.”
“Don’t worry. It will be.”
Abruptly, she put an arm around Carmen and started jaywalking to the other side of the street. Apparently teleportation was out.
I followed.
I’m not sure what I expected, but it definitely wasn’t that she would walk to the end of the block and go into the gas station on the corner. I followed her dubiously, and I even saw Carmen beginning to show the first twinklings of doubt.
The station was run down, kind of dingy, lit by fluorescents that hummed like they were about to explode. We were the only people inside, save for the attendant, an unremarkable Asian man who sat bored on a stool in front of a locked glass case full of cigarette cartons, flipping through a magazine.
“This is a 7Eleven,” I said flatly.
Riley ignored me and walked confidently up to the attendant. “Hey mate. Got any sulfur?”
He didn’t look up. “No. This is a gas station. Why would we have that?”
“Riley—” I started, annoyed and anxious.
She held a finger up at me. “What about brimstone?”
“Walk-in beer cooler,” he said promptly, still without looking. “Grab one off the shelf.”
“Cheers, mate,” Riley said, then started leading Carmen towards the back. Again, I followed.
Something rolled a bit in my stomach.
The walk-in cooler was appropriately cool, and Riley pulled Carmen close. The poor girl looked like she was having some kind of out-of-body experience. I could tell the surreality of her situation was starting to intrude a bit too much onto her excitement.
Riley walked to the corner, where a little wire shelf held a few microbrews that nobody actually drank in six packs. She let Carmen go, and bent over, looking to take one from the bottom. It was unlabeled, in a simple cardboard carrier that looked like it was older than the building we were standing in. I would have been afraid to drink any liquid that came out of those bottles, even if it weren’t beer.
Instead of lifting it, though, she just tugged it upward, and there was a soft click. She stepped back, drawing Carmen with her, and suddenly the wire shelf and the wall behind it began to swing outward.
It revealed a thick, reinforced iron door with a small slat on the front.
Carmen gasped, her excitement flooding back to her. She’d probably remember tonight for the rest of her life. And why not? It’s not every day you got to go with a supervillain rockstar and her weird albino friend into beer cooler Narnia.
The slat on the door shot open, revealing a pair of professionally suspicious eyes. “Password?” rumbled a deep voice, presumably from the eyes’ owner.
“Antoinette,” Riley said.
The eyes regarded her. “That was last week.”
“It was last night you cock,” Riley said. “Do we have to do this every time?”
“Yes,” the eyes said. “Protocol. One moment.”
The slat snapped shut. The door clicked, and then smoothly opened.
The man who stood behind it looked like every bouncer at a high-end club there had ever been—and I do mean every, including the only one I’d ever been to. I’m not sure what about him tipped me off—he looked human enough, big and boring and professional—but I felt like I had been plunged in an ice water bath. There was something about the way he moved, that made me think he was wearing a mask, except this one was flesh instead of cloth.
He stepped aside and Riley started in, arm around Carmen’s waist.
And I, for better or worse, followed.
We went down a short hallway to a set of steep, narrow stairs. At the bottom, another door waited, and Riley wasted no time pushing this one open.
It was like I had gone back in time. Back to the 1920s, or some poet’s dream of them. It was a speakeasy in the most classic sense, a club for people in the know to get whatever alcohol or other illicit substances they desired. There was a bar along the far wall, and a series of lounge-style booths made up most of the seating. A gorgeous woman in a very slinky red dress stood on the stage, cooing a song to a quietly appreciative crowd. She had a pair of small, almost dainty horns emerging from her forehead.
I couldn’t tell you how I knew they were all metahuman. My guess was psychic intuition, my mind instinctively feeling for traces of power around them, and finding it. It helped that enough had physical mutations that even if I weren’t psychic, it wouldn’t be that much of a leap. Green skin here, a set of wicked spines there. They flaunted them openly, unafraid of the people around them.
Carmen looked simultaneously terrified and exultant.
Riley looked at me, eyes drinking in the expression on my face.
Then she said, “Welcome to Club Hellfire, Anna.”
I stared at her.
Then I noticed heads start to turn.
It was subtle at first, as a couple people glanced up at the new arrivals, looking away, and then double-taking. They alerted people around them, people they were with, and pretty soon every face in the bar was turned towards us, the murmur of conversation dying. The woman on the stage stopped singing, her soft musical track drifting into nothing.
I realized they weren’t looking at us.
They were looking at me.
“The fuck?” Riley said softly, unsure of herself for the first time.
“Are we in danger?” Carmen whispered, now frozen with terror.
“I’m not sure—” Riley began, but she was cut off.
It started in the back, and picked up quickly, spreading to everyone in the room.
Applause. Cheers. Triumph.
They came to their feet and gave me a standing ovation.
And it went on.
Riley looked between the club, and me, back at the club, and back to me. “Huh,” she grunted. “Looks like you’re famous, Snow White.”