A Once Crowded Sky (42 page)

Anna Averies #1

“I’m not supposed to be anybody important. I was a reporter. I had a byline so some people got my name. But not that many people look at those things. I’m not sure you’re really supposed to know who wrote what.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say here. I mean, who doesn’t know Pen? He’s famous. Everyone knows him. Everyone knows his story. He’s the sidekick. And he died. And he didn’t show up once. When most of y’all—I mean, what can I add?

“I’m the girlfriend. The wife. I never flew.”

Anna falters at the podium. Her fingers unpainted, her hand gripping and releasing the wood, she dips her lips forward, forces her tongue to rise and fall; no words come.

A bird’s caw muffled behind the throb of insects. The frustrated rustle of wind pushing through the surrounding trees. Some coughing and the swish of black fabrics as legs are crossed and uncrossed. A husband silent. A coffin halfway down. A plane’s rising roar marking a break through the sky, a slash into the blue.

2

Strength, Woman Without Weakness #504

Hours after the funeral, Strength arrives at the spout and stares into its layered colors, the interlocking stories spitting out of the graves. She’s alone. The heroes are scared of this place. They don’t want to see what they were, what they could’ve been again.

The land is hers now. Star-Knight’s gone. He recovered from Pen’s wounds and walked away from it all, leaving his entire empire to Strength. The man had no heirs, and he apparently trusted her. Maybe it was because she’d helped him back at Pen’s place, or maybe it was because she and SK, despite all their bullshit, had one thing in common: neither of them cared a damn about The Blue, except that it was all they cared about.

Strength extends her hand toward the light. The stream’s heat bounces along the tips of her fingers. A tale of Strength fighting Tenuous at the Arcadia Dome leaps from the pile, and she cups her hand, holds the picture in her palm, a stray ember jerking and burning on her skin. Eventually, she has to let go, and the story falls back to the leaves and sticks below.

Strength takes a few steps back, turning away from the stories and admiring the starry sky nursing the cemetery. For a second she imagines all the villains rising out of their graves, all looming over her, all about to undergo defeat at the hands of the strongest hero alive. It’s a nice fantasy and she lets it go for a while before turning back to The Blue, preparing to run at it, to bathe in the swirl of good and bad guys crusading ever on.

She deserves this. It should have been her. Not Ultimate. Not Pen. Just her alone.

She can close the gap, restart a world of powers. There’s no life for her outside the game. Strength is weak and pathetic, and she deserves to lose herself in a spectacular blaze. If it works, it works. If she can make the unmade sacrifice, it’s all fine. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. But she deserves this. This is hers. There are no gods. No destinies or chances. There are only people and their strengths; there’s only her and the story, and they’re coming together now.

Strength charges forward, sprinting toward her own end. She approaches the crackling rim, and the tales reach out to her, welcoming her inside. It’s been so long since she was held by them. How safe it will be then.

It will hurt and burn, but she’s unafraid of pain, and that’s not why she hesitates, throws her arms back, digs her toes into the soil, wavers unbalanced, her face now pressed into The Blue, singed by its power. It hurts, but it’s beautiful, and she pulls back—she pulls back.

Her breaths come in sharp spurts. She can’t do it. She leans in, shoves her weight to the front, and tries to fall. She can’t do it. An old hurt nudges her forward, but she just can’t.

Strength slips a few steps back, dropping to the ground. The stories continue to mix and melt in front of her, and she sees Ultimate carrying her in his arms as he flies above Arcadia City. She wipes the sweat from her neck and scratches at her hand.

She sits back, rests for hours, lets the sun rise around her, allows the night to shrink into the safety of shadows. With the coming light, the stories of The Blue fade, seem to retreat away from the light back toward a little crater dug up only a few weeks ago, a hole waiting for a world to disappear into darkness so that it can once again shine.

There are shovels not so far away, and Strength gets up and walks across the yard to pick one up. The ground doesn’t give easily, and it takes
her a while to get the edge of the instrument into the dirt, to lift the soil and pour it into the hole. The day’s almost gone by the time she’s filled the whole thing and is patting it closed, smoothing out the rocks and sand so that no one can notice this spot and return and unearth this odd treasure. She even runs her feet over the circle around which she’d once stood and watched as Pen entered and then fled, Prophetier and Soldier whaling at him as she stood by and did nothing.

It’s not perfect. Those who already know, who were paying close enough attention, will always know where this spot of blue lies. But she guesses that most people that day were too enraptured by the drama to mark the location and recall it well enough to return to this exact touch of land. All that money she’s got now, it’ll be enough to move the graves a few miles off, to ensure that this place becomes secret again. The Blue will lay buried for a while, maybe forever. Anyway, she’s done all she can. It’s time to go back now. They all go back, even her.

She walks through and out of the Villains’ Graveyard. She drives back through the streets of Arcadia, watching the lamps glow stronger against the descending night, rolling waves of yellow light into the city’s fog. Finally, she parks at the gym near her house.

It’s fairly crowded inside; there are three men around her, close in, but she ignores them and starts lifting, beginning with biceps. After The Blue, she’d been so scrawny, but her body’s built back up now, and there’s tone in her arms and thighs, raw strength fueling them, preparing them for another lift. She does a set of twenty and then another of ten and then rests on a bench for thirty seconds before getting up for another.

She’d wanted to do it. She’d needed to be forever gone to prove that she was stronger than all of them, that only she understood: there is no need for this earth, this life without the gift of power—so she ran toward it, ready to die.

And she stopped at the edge, unable to hurl herself upon this particular destiny. Because she was weak and scared and she didn’t want to be part of the stories; she wanted to go back to the gym and do another set and make herself strong again. She was a coward, a pathetic, weak coward, and her life now was a testament to that, to her inability to follow the word of the gods, to her stubborn insistence on freeing herself from anything easy or simple.

In the mirror her muscles protrude as she again brings the weight
to her shoulder, and she smiles, wearing her weakness well, as Pen always had. Strength lets the weight down, and it sways at the end of her arm. Say what you will, but the boy’d always worn it well.

Doctor Speed #345

Felix holds his mouth closed as he burps, his cheeks ballooning out. It’s funny somehow. He laughs, and he takes a drink, enjoying the liquid trickling down his throat, settling down comfortably in the empty circle at his center.

“Doc!” A deep voice jumps from behind Felix. “Doc goddamn Speed! That you, buddy? You in for the funeral too?”

A large bulb of a man, brown hair sprouting in equal knots from his face and head, tilts the stool to Felix’s left and pounds his open palm into Felix’s back. The motion teeters Felix forward toward the bar, and all the wooden walls tornado in his eyes, swirling into a world of brown decorated by the sparkle of liquid glass.

“May I help you?” Felix asks, his eyes half-drooped.

“Doc, how the hell’re you, buddy? All’s good? Family and all that? Everyone’s good?”

Felix blows through his lips, creating a staccato farting noise that he plays with for a few moments before dipping his mouth back to the brown.

“Drink?” Felix asks, his teeth locked to the glass.

“Nah, got one here,” Herc says, looking around, his large hands empty. “Here somewhere . . .”

“Bartender! Drink!” Felix shouts down the line, and the girl with the glasses, who looks as old as his daughter should be, comes over, and Herc orders a beer that clouds his beard as he gulps down half the glass in the first stroke.

“Beer is good!” Herc says.

“Damn good.”

“To beer.” Herc takes another slug and raises his glass. “And Pen! PenUltimate and him feeling our metal! Beer and Pen! Why do the good go down so fast?” Herc tips his glass to the sky. “And easy.” He snorts loudly as he signals the girl that he’s ready for another.

“Pen!” Felix raises his glass as well, lifting his hand before he’s finished; if she’s grabbing another one for him, then why not?

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, Doc, my friend. Kid was a coward. I might’ve shot him myself. Fucking coward. Know what I mean, Doc?”

“Coward.”

“Coward! Yes!” Herc’s beer arrives, and he grasps it in both hands. “But still, he wasn’t all bad when you were in a battle with him, know what I mean? He fought good for a little guy.”

“Oh, sure.”

“To Pen, the little fighter!”

“Pen!”

“God, that’s a lot of us.” Herc wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “A lot of dead.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, who’s left, right? Who’s left?”

“No one.”

“Me and you, pal. That’s who. Me and the Doc!”

“Me and you.”

The two men drink together for some time. Felix drinks from a small glass with three rivets in it on with which he can mark how far he is from the bottom, and Herc drinks from a large mug with scantily dressed glass girls bulging out of it.

“I’ll tell you,” Herc says, “if I’d had those powers still, I’d have been doing great things. Building a better world, Doc. A better world . . .”

Felix’s mouth goes numb, which means he’ll be sick again in the morning, but also means that he might as well have another because he can’t get more sick than he’ll already be. It’s going to be one of those long liquid nights that spill over themselves and the walls and the bar and rise up your feet and shins, sit in puddles in your lap, rise again to your elbows, chest, and chin and then to your lips, spilling warm over your tongue, friendly and warm, until you drown. Sometimes he hears his old colleague talking, and sometimes he doesn’t, too busy swaying in the waves, bobbing up and down in the brown tide. It’s been a while since he wasn’t wet, since he had the heart in his hand.

“. . . I was a son of god, you know, and what was Pen? Can I ask you that? My father was Zeus, and my mother was a milk maiden, pranced about a field. He raped her. Stuck his thunder up her dress and
kaboom!
”

“Sure.”

“I was a half a god, and that’s twice the god Pen ever was—”

“Are we coming back?” Felix interrupts.

“What?”

“Are they coming back?”

“Who, Doc?”

“I want to know.”

“What, you mean Pen?”

“No, no, I don’t mean . . .” Felix’s voice drops off, weighed down by the swish of brown in his mouth.

“Doc, you are drunk. You should know that.”

“When are they coming back? When are they coming back, Herc? You can tell me, Herc, c’mon, tell me.”

Herc releases his mug back onto the bar. The big man swivels his stool to face Felix and cocks his head, his wet mouth slightly ajar. It’s like he’s sizing Felix up the way villains used to do before they’d jump on you or the way his wife used to do before she’d jump on him. Felix giggles into his glass and sips a little more down.

“I’m sorry,” Herc says. “I forgot about your family. About Penelope. And your daughter and—damn, I’m sorry for that.”

“It’s okay,” Felix says, with a wave of his free arm, “things happen.”

“You know, I’ve lost a few families over the years. There were a lot of wives and daughters, Doc.” Herc scratches at his beard and then tugs it down. “Seems like a long time ago.”

Felix starts to beat his palm against the bar to a ruddy beat because he doesn’t want to think about her anymore, and he thinks about how the beat reminds him of a heart he used to have.

“I had this one girl, Doc. Arabia, you know her? The one from the
Arabian Nights
, who told all those stories. She was on The Liberty Legion back when anybody could get on. But, Doc, she was the one. From about the ninth century we had a thing going.” Herc picks his mug up again and drains it to the bottom. “I loved her, Doc! I loved her a thousand times in one night!”

“Can I tell you something?”

“She used to tell me stories, Doc, the best damn stories. That was her power, her voice tricked you! And she used to tell me about that guy, the original jackass one, who kept her haremed all those years. She used to go on about that one. And it was fucking dirty, you know?”