Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen (22 page)

“And you’ll come with me?”

He nodded. “I’ll keep you safe, teach you the rules. We stay out of places we’re not wanted, don’t see anything we shouldn’t.”

His hands were open. Join me, his whole body begged.

With some effort I looked away from him, toward the door. The lost-and-found business could be just a cover. Imagine what he could do for an intelligence service or a criminal organization. His charming front could be a scheme to recruit me for my skills. Why should I trust someone I knew nothing about?

“I’ll need to think about this.”

He made a tiny nod. His shoulders sagged and for that moment I saw the great boulder of loneliness he carried. Then he smiled, and the moment was gone.

“I’ll walk you downstairs,” he said, in a voice that knew I’d never come back.

* * *

The phone was ringing at the reception desk as we walked past. He ignored it. “Landlord again. I’m always late because my paycheque’s always late.”

“People pay you for what you do?”

“Not directly. I have a source of money. It’s not much.”

“Oh.”

“You’re wondering,” h
e said. “How I can afford to take on help.”

“I wasn’t.” I was actually wondering what this mysterious source was.

“The cheque comes in every month. I find more things, I get more money. Only I don’t find so many things because I’m doing everything else. I write down the requests and I manage the office and I pay the bills and in between, if I have some time, I do some finding.”

“Do people phone you? Or email?”

“Not usually.”

I waited for him to explain further. He hummed an odd-sounding tune and continued downstairs. “So where are you from?” I finally asked.

“Lisbon, originally. Italy for a while. Came here a few years back.” He halted on the stairs. His face was suddenly blank. He took out the notebook and wrote something rapidly with the page turned away from me. “Sorry. Busy day.”

We had reached the hallway. He found a key in his pocket, opened the mailbox.

“
Mirabile dictu
,” he said, and took out a brown envelope.

“The cheque’s arrived?”

It went straight into his pocket. I caught a flash of an X-shaped logo. It looked vaguely familiar.

“Lilya,” he said, pumping my hand, “it has been a great pleasure meeting you. If I could do anything to change your mind…”

You could tell me who you’re working for. Who you really are and why you do this
. But I didn’t say it out loud; I thanked him for his time and left.

I spent the day distilling my résumé into its least pathetic form (that’s right, employers: I’m
highly motivated
and
people-focused
), reading help-wanted postings online, and researching whether lying on a job application could get you arrested for fraud.

Around midnight I realized that there was only one job I wanted. I pushed out of the boundaries of my skin.

The bars and terraces on College Street were bursting with light and music, but I flew over them and found the third-floor window, with the postcard still there. Passing through glass always makes me shiver. The office was dark, the reception desk empty but for a scrap of paper: “Jean-Philippe Delacroix — Bamako, Mali — lost dog.”

I glided down the corridor. I’d start looking for information in the other room, the one I hadn’t seen inside. I eased myself through drywall and wooden studs. In the dark I made out a small sparsely filled bookshelf, a battered suitcase on the floor, a little table, a narrow bed— and a figure in it. Tony was asleep. Good. That envelope, torn open, lay on the table. In the dark I couldn’t read the writing.

“You came back, Lilya.”

He sat up in bed, looking at me. I panicked. I was supposed to be invisible.

“You really want to know?” he said. “I’ll help you.”

He stood and clicked the light on. He was wearing the kind of old linen nightshirt that you only see in period films, his thin legs and bony feet showing below the hem. Embarrassment flooded me. This was where Tony lived: in a bare room in his office with an iron bed and no decorations but for a wooden cross on the wall. His few books were tattered. I was certain that all his clothes fitted in that little suitcase.

Tony tapped the envelope. “You see?”

The logo printed on it was a pair of crossed keys. He pulled from inside it a cheque stub. I couldn’t read much of the Italian on it, but I saw the name of the payee: Antonio di Padova.

He reached toward me and touched my mistformed hand. A burst of warmth ran through me, a taste of mint and sunshine.

“Go home now,” he said. “Sleep. We talk tomorrow.”

* * *

“Good morning, Tony,” I said, and settled into the sagging armchair. “Here, I brought you a proper coffee.”

He sipped slowly, eyes closed, a smile easing onto his face. “Such luxury. Did you find out what you needed to know?”

“I did my research. You’re older than you
look.”

“And I look like an old man.” He laughed, eyes shining within a thousand creases. “So many people want my help. It keeps me young.”

“Do I need to convert to your faith?”

“You need to be who you are.”

“What would the money be like for me?”

“If you’re good at finding, the Vatican will pay you well enough.”

“But you’re a monk. You don’t need much.”

“I’m a friar,” he said. “Same vows of poverty and celibacy, but I live among the people. You’re not bound to poverty, so you’ll get paid better.”

“So you don’t sell your services to anyone? And you won’t come on to me?”

He looked at me and said quietly, “I’ll die before I break my vows.”

“Okay, Tony.” I cleared my throat. I wanted to make this sound official. “I mean, Anthony of Padua. I want a job where I can fly around the world helping people. I hereby apply for the position of sidekick to the patron saint of lost things.”

* * *

Born in Europe and based in Toronto, Luke Murphy is a writer, animator, designer, and film and video editor.

Crusher and Typhoon

Brent Nichols

The railroad lay sprawled across the mountain valley like a discarded toy. Dan Carter sat on the tiny porch on the back of his personal train car, gazing at where the tracks ended, and thought about the dreams that had died when Sir John A. Macdonald abandoned the National Dream.

“Bloody airships,” he muttered. You couldn’t see the country you were passing through in an airship, not like from a train. People said train travel took away the intimacy of riding and walking, but airships were much worse.

It had been ten years since polio had withered Dan’s legs, three years since the National Dream had lifted him from the depths of self-pity. It had set his very blood on fire, carving a nation out of a wilderness, driving his way west until he challenged the granite walls of the Rocky Mountains themselves. He used to lie awake dreaming of the day he’d roll triumphantly into Gastown.

Now he never would. Now he was a scavenger, not a builder of nations and dreams. His job was to salvage rails and spikes from the road bed, load them onto flatcars, and ship them back east to be melted down for scrap. When he was finished the CPR would be no more, and even the role of scavenger would be taken away.

In the distance a dozen white men were pulling spikes and lifting rails while a couple of dozen Chinese watched. The Chinese were more victims of the airship infestation. The CPR had brought them to Canada in large numbers, put them to work building half a railroad, and discarded them like the rails.

Most of them were beyond salvage, Dan knew. They spoke little English, and the gulfs of race and culture would keep them unemployed. Unable to return to China and unable to move on, they had gathered in a makeshift village beside the tracks. Now the tracks were coming up and they were being left behind, in an inhospitable cleft between mountains, with winter coming on.

“At least they’re able-bodied,” Dan muttered.

“What’s that, Mr. Carter?”

Dan glanced at Phil Jones, his assistant. “Nothing, Phil.” He thought for a moment. “On second thought, I’d like to take a look at the work site.”

“Really?” Phil no longer bothered to hide his annoyance at Dan’s requests.

Forcing a wheelchair over rough ground was a hell of a chore, Dan was willing to concede, but it was, after all, the man’s job. “Yes, really,” he said curtly.

Phil sighed, got up, and went to grab the wheelchair ramp.

* * *

Lee Wu sat on a low hill of broken rock, watching men lift rails that he’d worked damned hard to put in place. He was drunk, his head spinning from the rotgut whiskey he’d been sipping for most of the day. It was vile stuff, but it reduced the knot of frustrated rage in his belly, diffused and dispersed it until it was a warm glow that was almost pleasant.

A shout drew his attention to the shantytown near the tracks. He could see four young white men swaggering into the rude collection of shacks. They weren’t workers from the rail salvage project. These were men of a different sort, two of them with pistols on their hips. One man shoved old Yi Ah out of his way. She reeled to the side and toppled, her brown limbs sticking up like twigs, and the white man kicked her foot out of his path.

Wu was halfway to the shantytown before he knew he’d decided to act. The ground seemed far away, and he cursed the alcohol he’d drunk. There was a time, long ago, when he’d been a warrior. That was in China, a world and a lifetime away, and he was all too aware of how far he’d fallen.

Still, he remembered a thing or two.

A handful of Chinese men stood in an uncertain cluster, looking to each other for courage, and the four strangers strutted toward them. The confrontation was about to reach its peak, and Wu could only hope that no one would draw a gun.

He could see other white men leaving their work at the rails and sauntering over to watch. Bitter experience told Wu that they would be no help at all. This was a problem for the Chinese, and the Chinese would have to handle it.

The four white men reached the cluster of Chinese and shouldered their way through, grinning, clearly hoping someone would object. A brawny hand hit Zhao Bo in the chest, knocking him onto his rear end. Bo’s face turned red, a man laughed, and Wu picked up his pace, knowing the fight was about to start.

* * *

“Faster,” said Dan, and Phil made a disparaging sound behind him. He did pick up the pace, though, nearly spilling Dan from the seat as the chair bounced on rocks and bits of scrap lumber. They reached the long line of gawking workmen, and Phil slid the chair between two men, allowing Dan to see.

Dan was just in time to see a thin young man in a white Stetson draw a six-gun from the holster on his hip. The gun swung up, the sun glittered on the cylinder, and there was a blur of motion too fast for Dan to follow. The gun went spinning through the air, landing in the weeds thirty or more feet from the site of the brawl.

Almost a dozen men were pushing and shoving, sometimes throwing a punch. Directly in front of Dan, though, two men were facing off. The skinny man in the Stetson was holding his wrist and facing a slim Chinese man in a blue shirt. The skinny cowboy let go of his wrist and advanced, throwing punches left and right. He was good, too, snapping out crisp jabs and crosses, never telegraphing, never slowing down.

And every punch missed.

The Chinese man stood in front of him, bobbing and weaving, ducking, seeming to flow out of the way each time a fist came lashing at his face. There was a confident smirk on his face as he dodged one blow after another, until the cowboy lowered his arms, red-faced and panting.

His companions, though, were faring better. Two of the Chinese men were down, and another man staggered back from the fight, hands pressed to his face, blood pouring down his chin. The remaining two Chinese looked at each other, then broke and ran.

One cowboy stepped forward, coming up behind the Chinese in the blue shirt, and slammed a punch into the back of the man’s neck. The Chinese man stumbled forward, crashed into the skinny man’s chest, and collapsed.

After that, things turned ugly. A Chinese boy on the ground, he couldn’t have been more than sixteen, rose to his hands and knees, and the nearest cowboy drove a boot into his ribs. The boy collapsed with a grunt, curling into a ball. Two more kicks landed, then a third, and a girl in a long grey dress burst between the watching cowboys. She was shouting in Chinese as she dropped to her knees beside the boy, covering him with her body.

The cowboy kept kicking. She cried out as his boots hit her, and Dan echoed her cry, a wordless bellow of outrage. At first he had watched the fight with an instinctive sympathy for his fellow white men, but this was unconscionable.

The cowboy lost his patience and stooped, grabbed her by the hair, and hauled her to her feet. He punched her in the face and threw her to one side.

The men to Dan’s left and right watched, and did nothing.

“Don’t just stand there, you miserable cowards,” Dan shouted. One man gave him an uncomfortable glance before looking away. The rest ignored him.

“Fine,” he said. “If I’m the only man here…” And he put his hands on the arms of his chair. The chair started to roll as he pushed himself upward, but Phil, useful for once, caught the handles. With a final heave Dan made it onto his feet and stood swaying, gathering himself. When he was rested he could make it across a room. Here on rough ground he knew he wouldn’t get far. Still, he could not watch a woman being beaten and not do something about it.

He took a step. Then another. His legs shook, he had to wave his arms for balance, but he managed a third step, and a fourth. He was six or eight feet from the cowboy in the white Stetson, and the man turned to gape at him. Dan took another step, clenching his fists, and the cowboy laughed.

The laugh trailed off as the man looked past Dan’s shoulder. The workers, shamed at last into action, started passing Dan on both sides, and the cowboys quickly closed into a tight, defensive group. One man drew a pistol, and the two groups froze, several paces apart.