Resistance (18 page)

“First Wave,” says Vir. “Unique. Superpowers before birth.”

“They’ve tried to replicate it, you know. The Chinese sent up whole planes full of pregnant women,” says Aman. “Hasn’t worked so far.”

“Well, that makes Kalki even stranger,” says Vir. “Unquantified powers. Growing every day for eleven years. Insane. I say he’s our prime suspect.”

“You want to kill Kalki?” asks Uzma. “I thought you’d become some sort of wandering sage.”

“I could take him up to one of the space stations,” says Vir. “Keep him in orbit for a month. He’s a ticking bomb, Uzma.”

“You can go and have a word with Sher about it,” says Uzma. “An ex-Unit reunion. That should go well.”

“They always do, don’t they?”

“Children. Behave,” says Aman. “What else do we have?”

“We have any number of possible situations,” sighs Uzma. “Villain collective. Monsters, like the thing we saw in Tokyo. More magicians. Or some true believer creates a god.”

“There’s always the old-fashioned nuclear holocaust,” says Vir.

“No,” says Aman. “I’ve got that covered. Let’s stick to threats we know. I still think the magicians are our likeliest danger. How far have they got with their world building?”

“Not far at all,” says Vir. “None of their alternate realities are self-sustaining. We’re very far away from the day when we can actually build new worlds that people from here can travel to.”

“So, no mirror universes full of our evil alter-egos,” says Aman. “I always dreamt of Evil Dominatrix Uzma with a French beard and everything.”

“Save it for later,” says Uzma with a grin.

Vir looks at them sharply.

“If you two are done,” he says. “Yes, there will come a time when somebody creates an alternate world and people try to move there in large numbers. And yes, I’m sure things will go horribly wrong and people like us will have to step forward and do something. But I’m confident it won’t happen next week.”

Aman is distracted. A teenaged boy at the table next to theirs is recording their conversation surreptitiously. Aman deletes the video and forwards a set of sexts from the boy’s phone to his online public profile. The boy reads his email and runs out of the cafe in terror.

“And then there’s Norio,” says Aman. “Have you found him yet?”

Uzma has not. Worse, Azusa escaped when Wu and Wingman raced to rescue the rest of the Unit.

“And have you found Sundar?” asks Aman. “Sorry, I know you haven’t. We should. There’s a doomsday device builder if I ever met one. Norio told me he was his research head. But he isn’t on the Hisatomi payroll.”

“No one in the company knows anything about Norio’s other life,” says Uzma. “I’ve asked. Norio and his gang are missing, and presumably still working on whatever plan Norio has.”

“I’ve been through the list I gave him,” says Aman. “Lots of troublemaking potential, given his mind control machine, but nothing that can end the world.”

“What is this plan of his?” asks Vir.

“I honestly have no idea, and I’ve been tracking him for a while,” says Aman. “He clearly has a problem with supers, but his attack on all of us can’t have been in the works for very long – he got to Rowena through sheer good luck. Killing Jai was something he’s wanted to do since his father died. But there’s more to it. More to him. To know what he’s planning, we have to find out what else Sundar built for him. But I don’t see how we can do that.”

“You’ll find him eventually,” says Uzma. “He’s only human.”

“A human who drives a three-hundred-foot-tall mecha and defends Tokyo from giant monsters, when he’s not being a playboy billionaire and flirting with Utopic,” says Aman. “If he wants to stay hidden, I might not find him for a while. And in the meantime, we’ll have to find someone else to defend Tokyo.”

“What about the other members of ARMOR?” asks Uzma. “Can’t we get to them?”

“I know who they are,” says Aman. “Azusa is one. The other three are Tokyo gamers. They met online. They don’t know about Norio’s grand plan either. They don’t even know who he is.”

“Well, like the magicians, he’s going to be a problem, but not this week,” says Vir. “And if he pops up, we’ll get him. In the meantime, you have to find a way to listen to every phone call and read every message in the world.”

“On it,” says Aman. “And then there’s our dear friend Jai.”

“Jai doesn’t want to end the world,” says Vir. “He wants to rule it.”

“Who knows what he wants now,” says Aman. “But for starters, you should stay away from the Unit for a while, Uzma. Because when he wants revenge, it’s you he’ll come after.”

“Eleven other supers that we know of have powers like Jai’s,” says Uzma. “It’s not like it was when it was just us. He can be beaten.”

“Then you need to stay hidden until he is.”

“I’d love to skulk around the world with you, Aman,” says Uzma, “but I’m needed at the Unit. If I’m gone, it’s only a matter of time before I’m manoeuvred out of the team. I’m going to get blamed for this whole Jai problem.”

“How are you going to stop that?” Aman asks.

“I can be fairly convincing in person,” says Uzma.

Vir sighs. “I don’t understand how you can tolerate the nonsense that goes on in the Unit,” he says. “But then, it is what you wanted. World’s most famous.”

“This is nothing even close to what I wanted,” Uzma snaps. “But maybe I have a harder time quitting than you. Than either of you.”

“Well, you walked into that one,” says Aman. “I wonder sometimes whether I should have joined up. It might have gone better.”

Uzma looks puzzled. “I thought you were happy,” she says. “I thought you were the only one who was actually free.”

Aman shrugs. “Well, I wasn’t,” he says. “But maybe that has nothing to do with all this hero nonsense. Maybe this is what being in your thirties is like for everyone. Life not turning out how you expected it to. Regrets, misses, what-might-have-beens. What really twists the knife in is that we have superpowers. If our lives don’t meet our expectations, what’s the point?”

“Well,” says Uzma. “There’s an empty slot in the Unit now. And a suit of armour, I know someone who would fill it quite nicely.”

Aman laughs, but stops when he realises she’s completely serious.

“It would never work,” he says. “I’ve taken huge sums of money from every government in the world. Most big companies too. Exposed too many powerful people. Utopic alone would ensure I didn’t survive my first week.”

“Sure,” says Uzma. “No one else in the Unit has any enemies at all. Do you have any idea how many assassination attempts I’ve survived?”

“Yes,” says Aman.

Uzma shrugs. “I could use some company,” she says. “Someone I trust. That would be an interesting change.”

Aman is quiet for a while. He looks from Vir to Uzma and back, trying to think of the right thing to say. He looks around the cafe, at chattering tourists counting souvenirs, and annoyed writers pretending the noise the tourists are making is the only thing preventing their great novels from bursting forth into the world.

“You’re serious,” Aman says finally. “Join the Unit. Now. After all these years.”

“For me,” says Uzma. “And, you know, the whole ‘world is ending in a week’ thing. You could be the new Faceless. What could go wrong?”

Aman breathes deeply and tries to think with any degree of clarity.

“No,” he says finally.

“Ah well,” says Uzma. “You, Vir? You want to come back? Suit up?”

“Yes,” says Vir.

In the dusty, sweltering heat of Gurgaon, a bright yellow school bus trundles down a narrow road. On either side of the bus are ghost towns, their walls, once white, are now burnt and occasionally blood-streaked. A short way ahead, five pink arches straddle the road, proudly proclaiming, on solar-powered flashing boards bordered with orange flower-shaped lights, “Sunny Luvs Baljeet”. Norio asks the driver what this means, and is told it was for a traditional wedding. Though it is also apparently impossible to tell which one the groom is. As the bus passes under the arches, Norio sticks his head out of the window and looks up. There’s a dead dog on top of the third arch. Filing it all under Mysteries of India I Don’t Need to Solve, Norio leans back in his seat and reaches for his NutriPac. He picks up his phone, and holds it to his chest, tapping his fingers on its warm metal skin. It would be so easy to switch it on, call Azusa, apologise, ask for help. But Aman might be listening. Norio grits his teeth and stuffs his phone back in his pocket.

He’d arrived in India two days ago. It had been tough finding an authorised flight under a false name, but he’d been prepared: there were several apartments in central Tokyo alone where whole identities awaited him, along with enough cash to last him a decade. The only real danger had been Aman watching the biometric scanners as he passed through them, but Utopic board members could always find helpful airport officials. His Indian contacts had proved useless. The Indian head of Hisatomi’s software division in Hyderabad had refused to go anywhere north of Mumbai, but had put him in touch with various wheeler-dealer politicians in Delhi. They’d arranged for a police escort to take him from the walled city to Gurgaon, and so he’d set off in a convoy of white SUVs with flashing lights.

A minute after entering Gurgaon, his Delhi Police protectors had tried to kill him. But they were about as efficient at robbery as they were at actual law enforcement. Norio had thrown two policemen out of his car, and with a gun to the driver’s head, raced fast and far into Gurgaon. His pursuers had given up as soon as they approached gang territory. He’d ditched his car and its driver, and hired new transport easily enough in a karaoke bar that night.

The school bus is slow, but clearly one of the safest ways to travel in Gurgaon; several gangs have driven by it already, taken a cursory look, and moved on. The air conditioning doesn’t work, of course, and Norio’s paid extra to make them shut off the endlessly cheerful Bollywood music. This has not endeared him to the rest of his hired crew, three teenaged boys who sit at the back of the bus playing blackjack, and occasionally shooting speculative looks at their new foreign employer.

Norio shuts his eyes, and despite his best efforts, remembers another awkward silence, just a few days ago. But those men and women hadn’t been strangers. Norio has never had many friends, something he’s considered quite an achievement given his wealth, charm and good looks. But he’d never felt as close to anyone as he had to the ARMOR squad. The former ARMOR squad.

* * *

They’d stood around the underwater ARMOR base, awkward as action figures abandoned mid-play. He’d known there would be trouble the moment they entered, something about the way they’d looked at one another in the delivery pod, standing stiffly as cheesy music wafted through the heavy silence. They’d clearly had a conversation about this earlier.

The silence had to end eventually. Oni, always the most dramatic, had jumped in first, demanding to know why they hadn’t been summoned when the giant bear rose out of Tokyo Bay. Norio had lied, saying something about communications errors, but the rest of the team knew too much to believe him. They’d all seen the news about the Unit coming to meet him, the Unit battling the monster, and the unexplained goings-on later at Hisatomi Tower.

“We know who you really are, Goryo,” Raiju had said. “We’ve known for a while. But we talked about it, and agreed we should pretend we were all strangers. We liked the rules. But then you broke them.”

They’d been unhappy ever since the trip to Aman’s island. They’d spoken to Azusa, demanding to know why ARMOR was being used for Norio’s personal business instead of protecting Tokyo. She’d defended him: telling them they were hunting the Kaiju King, that they were close. Norio had tried to seize this opportunity. He’d told them he’d learnt the Kaiju King was somewhere in India, that ARMOR had to go there and bring him back. The rest of the team had swallowed that lie, and he’d been on the verge of winning them over, when Azusa had betrayed him.

“We do not know where the Kaiju King is,” she’d said. “But Kalki is in India. I think that’s who Goryo wants to find.”

A bitter argument had exploded: Oni and Baku had threatened to quit right then, saying this had nothing to do with defending Tokyo, that they hadn’t signed up to be some billionaire hero-wannabe’s hit squad. Norio had told them it was all connected, that finding Kalki would lead to the Kaiju King, and to so much more. He’d given them a fantastic speech: honour and duty and nobility, human endeavour against freaks and monsters, human ingenuity against unfair powers.

When he had finished, he’d taken his helmet off with a flourish, and asked them, hand on heart, to help him fix the world.

Instead, Raiju had asked Norio to stop this madness, or to at least keep ARMOR out of it. He’d found the energy for another speech then – he told them what a perfect team they were, what a symbol of human achievement. He reminded them of their greatest battles, conjuring up vivid pictures – ARMOR driving its sword through the heart of a T-Rex kaiju, their mechas in a five-point formation, cutting through the King’s classic floating eyeball kaiju. He reminded them of the fights, the glory, the friendships forged in black kaiju blood. He’d been exhausted when he’d finished. The rest of the team had taken their helmets off while he spoke, and he had seen how inspired they looked. He’d seen the tears in every eye.

“I call for a vote,” Raiju had said. “Goryo has forgotten the mission. We need a replacement.”

“Well, you can’t have one,” he’d snapped. He’d immediately regretted his words but had been too angry to stop. “This is
my
team.
My
mecha.”

“And your rules,” Baku had said. “But they apply to us all.”

“They apply to you,” he’d said. “Not to Amabie or myself. We are permanent. And if you have a problem with that, you can leave. I can replace you in an hour.”

Raiju had turned to walk away.

“Wait,” Azusa had said.

He’d looked at her, and seen, for some reason, the face of the little girl she’d been when they’d first met. He’d felt his heart stop as she spoke, her voice loud and clear, her eyes expressionless.