Minister Faust (46 page)

Backlit by the twinkling skyline, he was climbing up the dome with his clawed shadow-gloves, his shadow-cables keeping him from plummeting 150 stories to his death.

But above the whipping wind, I could hear the whine growing until it was like a band saw chewing into fresh pine. Kareem looked up—

“Okay, asshole!” shouted the Brotherfly. “Now you an me are gonna finish it for real!”

André opened his mouth wider than any human mouth should be able to and disgorged a steaming jet-spew of some type of corrosive, digestive juice onto Kareem. Kareem screamed, wiping at his exposed flesh, then reformatted his Xoskeleton to seal itself completely—even over his eyes. With Kareem stuck blind on the curve of the dome, André flew closer, kicking and kicking and kicking into Kareem’s shadow-armor until Kareem was swinging on his tow cables from the impacts, his body and legs whipping side to side. Then one of his feet went right into a camera, and the hexagon went null blue.

Flipping and clicking wildly to find another POV, I hit something that brought onscreen the phrase
TACHYON TOWER
—
UPPER DECK CAMERAS
—
SECURITY OVERRIDE
—
ACTIVATED
, and then I found myself witnessing an interior shot of Chip Monk and the Flying Squirrel smashing each other into the walls and across the chamber in a hurricane of weaponry and martial arts. In the brief moments when each man stopped to circle his opponent, they hurled fragments of cruelty at each other, horrible claims about disloyalty and hatred and paranoia.

The Flying Squirrel: “So, you’re mixed up with that shine, now? He’s doing for you what I wouldn’t? Wouldn’t Zenith be jealous?”

Chip Monk: “Zenith? The real hero that you murdered, Festus? Not that you’d do it yourself, that’d require you getting your hands dirty! You had your marionette Menton murder him for you!”

The Flying Squirrel: “How dare you question me!
Me!
”

The two men leapt, clashed, and the Squirrel fell onto his protégé. There was a loud crunch, and then Festus stumbled up backward, gasping, holding his hands in front of him as if to push away the sight of the motionless, costumed body on the ground.

E
xactly at that moment, the exterior camera started working again.

André was still pummeling Kareem, but the X-Man wasn’t even trying to fight back. Instead his Xoskeleton was growing something like a fiddler crab’s oversized arm, a massive drill-like tool that chewed a hole through the dome wall until Kareem retracted his device and slipped through the gap.

Using the security override, I dialed up an interior camera view just as André followed Kareem inside the chamber, only to be smashed across the room by what looked like a massive black flyswatter. André careened off equipment, hit the wall, and landed on his side.

Given the angle of his impact, his body’s contortion and his screaming, I guessed his hip was crushed and at least one of his legs was broken.

Sirens were howling, and speakers were automatically chanting
All personnel, this is a Level One emergency! Hull breach in the dimensional interface chamber! Initiating full system shutdown!

Behind André in the cavernous technochamber was a huge, radiant iris, a three-story gold-silver blossom whose center shimmered with nebula and stars, vibrating with a disturbing violet luminescence.

Kareem staggered over to André, his Xoskeleton fading to gray and then to nothingness. Panting and groaning, he clutched his side as if his ribs were broken.

“Now listen…you superduper…killer house nigger! I know…
you
killed…Hawk King!” His chest was heaving. He tried and failed to catch his breath. “Tell me why…kot-tammit!
Why?
”

“You
crazy,
nigga!”

“My
medu-kem…
found dust…from the Blue Pyramid walls…on your costume, André. But you said…you hadn’t been there…since you were a kid—”

“So your logoids are wrong!”

“No way in hell. I also had them…go through Festus’s computers…Big Squirrel Brother…has got the whole city…under observation. Grimhotep…finally decrypted the file I retrieved. Shows you…flying away from the Pyramid the night the King was murdered. With a scepter in your hands. The Scepter of Typhon.”

As his accusations grew in strength, Kareem regained his own.

“So how’d you do it, André? Mind-control him with the scepter into revealing his transmutation phrase…turn him into defenseless old Dr. Rogers in his wheelchair, and then kill him? And then…use the transmutation phrase to turn his body back into Hawk King’s so no one’d know? Why, muthafucka? How much did that son of a bitch pay you?”

André yelled, “Fuck you, man! Ain’nobody pay me! I loved Hawk King! I loved him! He was my hero!”

Kareem put his foot onto André’s pelvis and leaned.

The act—and André’s scream—was so repugnant that even as a trained psychotherapist, it was all I could do to keep myself from turning away.

“I aint fuckin around with you, André!” yelled Kareem. “Now you tell me why you did it, or next time I’m standing
up
on that muthafucka like you a StairMaster!”

When André’s eyes drifted back into focus, he said, “They were blackmailing me, man!”

“Who? Festus?”

“I don’t
know
who! Guy came to me, told me he’d tell my aunt Maybelle that I was responsible for my uncle Benteen’s death! It’d kill her if she found out!”

“His death?”

“Because, because my uncle, he…I was in my room one mornin, an I didn’know he was home, an he didn’think anybody else was home, so when he heard somethin in my room he just came up an barged in an caught me changin into my costume, an then he just had a massive heart attack—”

“He caught you fuckin a guy, didn’he, André?”

“What? No—no, that’s not true, Kareem!” said André, or perhaps I should say Andrew, given his speech shift. “Who told you that? It’s not true, whatever you heard!”

“No one told me—I figured it out days ago, after I bugged Doctor Brain’s glasses. Your whole origin story—it didn’t wash. All your ‘womanizing’—I
saw
the photos from your file of you at those nightclubs. Just cuz Eva doesn’t know what kind of clubs the Meet Market, Bone Dancers, and Peacocks are doesn’t mean I don’t!”

“No, Kareem, please, just…look, don’t tell my aunt, all right? Whatever you think of me, don’t tell my aunt—”

“You’re a kot-tam
murderer,
André! You think I’m just gonna give you a pass cuz you don’t wanna get in trouble with your aunty?”

“It’d
kill
her, Kareem! Don’t you understand? Just like my uncle—I was trying to protect her, that’s all! She raised me!”

“I don’t let murderers walk for
any
reason! Let alone the Judas who assassinated the greatest leader we ever had!”

“Oh…sure,” sobbed André, catching himself before he continued. “Fine. High and mighty Kareem. So perfectly just. Judging me! The homophobic, white girl–screwing hypocrite, judging me!”

“This aint about homophobia!”

“Isn’t it? When I went to join the L*A*B when you muthafuckas were recruiting? Remember that? I went down to the QRIB. All I wanted was to protect Stun-Glas. And all your friends, laughing about these applicants you’d rejected, ‘fag’ this and ‘fag’ that, and the Dreadlocker saying how he’d put some ‘battiman’ in the hospital just for looking at him and how he’d ‘put fyah’ on the next one he found!”

“
I
never talked like that, André—”

“No, but you didn’t fucking stop it, either, did you? Did you have Dreadlocker arrested for confessing to a horrible aggravated assault? Did you kick him out of the L*A*B? Even just fucking
talk
to him about it?”

X-Man looked down, opening his hands as if he’d left something important in them. “You’re right. André. You’re right,” he said, clearing his throat. “But that doesn’t excuse—”

Kareem was smashed against the wall.

I zoomed back: the Flying Squirrel was reaching into his utility pouches—

And then the monitors inked into blackness.

A Fear-Filled Final Inventory

I
couldn’t see anything. Even the eerie light of the dimensional portal had been snuffed out. The Dark Fantastic must’ve entered right behind the Squirrel. I clicked into the Brotherfly’s OM Meter cognistream, but he’d passed out. Festus’s link was still offline. My only means of monitoring was auditory.

“What’s a matter, Festus?” called Kareem. “Night-vision goggles don’t work? Even infrared is light, you know!”

“So we’re
all
blind, then! I’ll find you, Edgerton. And when I do, I’ll snap you into kindling!”

“I don’t think so, Festus. You’re tired. Exhausted! I can hear it in your voice! And there’re
two
of us!”

Sounds of tripping and falling—perhaps one man, maybe more.

The Squirrel: “Ah…but you’re injured
and
exhausted. As soon as I take out your hooded hoodlum friend and his darkness dissipates, you’ll be nothing but a lame black cockroach that can’t even dash for the shadows. And injured as you are, I’m guessing you won’t have power enough for many word-monstrosities now, will you?”

There were more sounds of crashing.

Kareem: “…Hey, that’s a great gamble, Piltdown. Sure…I don’t have any Words left at all. I’m defenseless!”

The Squirrel: “You’re bluffing.”

Kareem:
“Try me.”

Silence.

Kareem: “I’ll give you this, Festus—you had me fooled for the longest time. Didn’t even cross my mind that
you
were the one who’d arranged Hawk King’s murder.”

Festus: “You Liberian lunatic, so now you’ve shifted your roving delusions from Miss Brain-as-murderess onto me? What’s next? Accusing Iron Lass of assassinating Lincoln? Or Caesar? Or Abel?”

“It took me a while to put it all together, Festy…but when I saw how totally broken up you were about Iron Lass—you haven’t just been mourning her, you’ve been racked with guilt because you never thought your plot would get her poisoned!”

“That’s why you went on this terrorist crusade of yours, you crackpot? Because I was mourning the impending death of a lifelong comrade?”

“No—because you, the world’s self-proclaimed greatest detective, were dragging your feet on
two
investigations! I thought, Why isn’t he out rousting everyone he can think of? He loves this woman, and revenge is that bastard’s middle name! So why wouldn’t you be attacking somebody, anybody, tossing whole neighborhoods for suspects…unless you knew there was nobody to hunt down, because
you’d
arranged for Asteroid Zed to be destroyed! Nobody wanted to go up there when Brain insisted, but
you
practically exploded a lung in protest! And then you wanted to take your own shuttle, but even when you finally relented and took the Space Elevator with us, you still had one of your ships standing by on remote!”

“You equate preparedness with homicide? Your lapses in logic have always been astonishing, Edgerton, but even for you, this is grand!”

More stumbling and crashing.

Kareem: “If I’ve got lapses in my logic, Pilty, it’s funny how much your own computer records and surveillance footage helped form a picture of what you did, and what you’re planning to do.”

Silence.

“Nothing to say to that, huh? Yeah, I thought so. Even
I
didn’t know I could do that until escaping Asteroid Zed gave me no choice but to send my Words inside the computers. But because of that crash course I realized I could search your mainframe, and that’s how I found out the people you’ve had combing the Middle East had finally located the Scepter of Typhon months ago, after searching for it for years. And even though it’s one of the only things that could make Hawk King vulnerable, you never turned it over to him, your supposed idol.

“Why wouldn’t you? Unless you needed an ace up your sleeve—or a dagger? You had to destroy Asteroid Zed because my investigation would take me to Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid, and you had no way of knowing whether their Qosmic Qonsciousness might’ve picked up on what you’d done, or the attack that L-Raunzenu was planning, the one that no one but you and Hawk King knew about!”

“L-Raunzenu? What in God’s—you’re truly deranged, do you know that, Edgerton?”

“And you also couldn’t risk me finding out that Menton and Sarah Bellum’d been moved. You were using them for your dimensional research, right? I mean, one of your holding companies owns Tachyon Tower! Sarah Bellum probably burned out or died, so you went back to the store for something with a little bit more kick. And who better to arrange the destruction of Asteroid Zed than the head of the company that retrofitted it after Gil, the Kid, and Menton were transferred there in the first place, and the head of the corporation that ran the Asteroid after the kot-tam thing was privatized? You’d think—”

A crash. Huffing. Cracking.

The lights seeped back on, emergency lights in red and the dimensional portal in purple.

The Flying Squirrel was standing over the cloaked body of the Dark Fantastic, all of whose limbs were pointing in directions they shouldn’t have been. And right beside them stood the X-Man.