All posts by thewizardofwoah

Unknown's avatar

About thewizardofwoah

Amateur writer, snarker of silly things.

Chapter Fifty-Eight: The Whaleboat

Book Three: This Hollow Season.

The Physician glided down the hall, leading his young guests deep down the halls of Ravenscroft Manor, their footsteps and his tour-guide patter reverberating off old stone:

“None of you besides Maelstrom—”

“David,” the boy cut in sharp as a knife.

The Physician kept going like nobody had interrupted him. “—Have visited me before, have you?”

“No,” David answered, his voice hard. 

The Physician hadn’t asked the children any follow up questions. Hadn’t asked how their friends and David’s mother had died, or why. Nothing resembling grief, sympathy, or even curiosity. The children could have been dropping in for Christmas lunch. Part of David was relieved. What would the Physician’s kindness look like?

“The last lord’s mother sold me the place before she went back to the UK to die. English aristocrats are a lot like elephants in that respect. Her sons had killed each other.” The Physician’s fingers scuttled against his lab-coat. “Superheroes.”

Arnold was sticking close to Mabel, just managing to resist clinging to her shoulders. The Physician’s home didn’t match its owner. His only concession to modernity was that the sconces on the walls were left empty in favour of electric lights that gave off a sodium glow not quite suited for human eyes. 

And the place was filthy. Arnold’s feet kept getting caught in sinkholes of rotten carpet. Long dead blue-bloods grew green and frog-like as mold and moss consumed their portraits. Cockroaches skittered in and out of the light, while rats chittered in the shadows. The whole castle smelled like week-old pyjama pants. Arnold was shocked. Weren’t aliens supposed to be shiny and antiseptic?  

But then, monsters were supposed to live in caves.

“Excuse me… Dr. Smith?”

“Yes, Arnold?”

“Was the castle always so… like this?” 

“Oh no,” said the Physician. Even walking behind him, Arnold swore he spotted the corners of his lips. “It took me years to get the place remotely livable. You humans keep your homes so sterile.” The Physician snatched a fat moth orbiting the light above him.  When he opened his palm, the moth was gone. “Barren.”

Billy clapped at the magic trick. The other children glared him into silence. 

Allison kept gritting her teeth. The Physician’s song didn’t hit her like a tidal wave the way it used to, but it was still music that had never been intended for her ears. Her new mess of senses didn’t help matters. The Physician’s whole body was one balefully bright brain. A book that had to be read left-to-right, right-to-left, crosswise and lengthwise, all at once. Looking at him was like staring at a candle flame, letting it burn a black hole right into her sight.

“Does Timothy Valour come here much?” Allison asked bitterly. 

“Sometimes,” answered the Physician. “Usually he sticks to the guest house. Hell of a pinochle player. Why do you ask?” 

“He sent soldiers to kill our family.”

“Oh. Yes, I think I heard about that. You blew up Parliament, apparently?”  

“We didn’t!” Arnold insisted. “That was Lawrence!”

As usual, the Physician showed no sign of surprise, though Allison did see whirls form in his aura. “I didn’t think the old man had it in him. Any idea why?”

“Because he was scared,” David said. “Scared of going to jail and scared we didn’t need him.” He skipped backwards to Allison’s side, taking her hand and smiling at her. “We’re gonna kill Tim for what he did,” he said. “We’re gonna make him wish he jumped out the window.”

Mabel and Arnold shrank in on themselves. Billy’s tail was swishing like mad behind him. 

Allison forced a smile. She hated that it didn’t come naturally. Why couldn’t she follow David to that cool, easy hate? Her own cut and scratched inside her like she’d swallowed a razor.

Queasy, unfamiliar images of Valour swam to the surface of her mind. That grey, flaccid old natural, scowling at him from behind his desk like a tired schoolmaster— 

The Physician clapped his hands together, breaking the spell. “I’m glad you have a project, kids.”

“We don’t—” Mabel started, then trailed off. “Nevermind. Thanks, I guess?”

“It would be good if you could hold off on that for a while, though.” Once again the Physician ignored any interruptions. “I have some business that could use men like Timothy.”

David frowned. “What kinda ‘business’?”

“Don’t worry, David. I don’t expect it to stretch on much longer. Especially now that you children are staying with me.”

David grinned ferally. 

The group turned a corner in time to see a man in a lichenous three piece suit wandering out of a side-room. Large, expressioness, unsettlingly Nordic—undeniably a Physician drone.       

The Physician called the man-shaped creature over. “Call ahead to ship for me and tell them to prepare five cells—”

Mabel raised an eyebrow. “Cells?”

“Call them ‘rooms’ if you must. Honestly, English is such a simple language, surely you should already know all the ambiguities.”

“Wait, the ship?” asked David. “You’re taking us to your spaceship?”

“Please don’t call her a ‘the’, it’s inaccurate. But yes, I am. I figure it’ll be easier for everyone if you’re not here when the DDHA pops in.”

Billy whooped excitedly. So did Arnold. Whatever they thought of the Physician, he had a spaceship. 

Dr. Smith had more instructions for his henchman. “Have them whip up dinner for them while you’re at it. Human edible this time. I don’t want another repeat of the crystalized time incident.” The Physician briefly glanced at Allison, still tensed against the tide of his song. “It’d be good if a psi-dampener was waiting for me at the table.”   

The drone intoned “Yes, master,” in his kind’s trademark monotone.

Allison looked at the drone’s blank, chiseled feature, trying to focus on his short, oddly regular song, near identical to a few others echoing through the castle. She was surprised how much the resemblance to Mr. Thumps comforted her. 

She wondered if he would have to die, too.

The drone marched off, while the Physician and company came to a set of chipped, weathered wooden doors, carved with married saints and worn dragons. 

“So how are we going to get there?” asked Arnold. “You’re not going to drive us, are you?”

“Oh no.” The Physician snapped his long fingers. They made a sound like clapping sticks. “Think of the petrol.”

The doors swung open onto a cavernous womb of polished stone and perished tapestries that probably had once been a grand dining hall. Much of the pavers had been torn out, replaced by a raised, bronze dais like a giant’s Petri dish. Another drone was standing ready at a mad scientist’s conductor stand, a book of knobs and buttons open in front of him. 

“Do you need transport, master?”

“That we do, Groove. Shipside. Try putting us down somewhere with a good view, would you?”

The drone tapped away at his control panel. The castle groaned and shook, the pavers vibrating beneath the children’s feet. 

The copper plate began to froth and bubble, though David could sense no liquid within. 

The Physician’s grin revealed yet more teeth. “I’ll go first, shall I?”

Nobody objected.

The star-tossed doctor stepped towards the edge of the circle like an Olympic swimmer getting ready to dive. He bent until he looked like a stunted capital L, and slowly leaned forward till he toppled in. 

Arnold eyed the unexpected pool warily. “Should we…”

Allison shrugged. “If it was a trick or something he wouldn’t have gone in first.”

She ran for the pool and dive bombed. 

Darkness. That didn’t surprise her. But the warmth did. She felt like she had jumped into a bubble-bath fully dressed. She fell and fell, until she found herself shooting upward—

Allison was deposited back in real space face-first. Bitter winds screamed over her, and something soft but cold pressed against her cheek. She climbed to her feet and found herself surrounded by white. Endless, rippling planes of white snow. Above the girl was a bleak, empty blue sky, broken only by the naked sun throwing down empty, cold light. Allison almost shivered, but then the warmth flowed up from the earth into her. Snowflakes melted and steamed away against her exposed skin. Allison’s suit went pale, glacial green and blue. She giggled.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?”

The Physician was standing with her back to Allison, his white lab coat fluttering like albatross wings in the blizzard. He was looking towards a range of white mountains, almost lost in the storm. 

A great tooth jutted out from the rock—or perhaps a claw, threatening the sky. Raised metal ridges on its side swirled like slicks of mercury on black water around a closed, copper-green eye, from which fanned flashing silver scales. Its belly was armoured in rust-red and Afghan blue, while its tip was capped with a dull gold cone. The more Allison looked at the sleeping beast, the more she was reminded of a giant fish.

The girl stared.

“She’s supposed to look like a raindrop,” the Physician commented. “It’s hard to tell when she’s stuck in the ground like that.”

Somehow, this didn’t damper Allison’s amazement. “Woah…” A thought twinged at her. “Shouldn’t she be covered in snow?”

“Good eye. Our lady runs too hot for snow to settle on her.” The Physician caught some snow between his fingers, rubbing it. “Besides, it doesn’t fall that much around here. This is mostly just old stuff picked up by the wind. Stale, really.”

“And where is here?”

“Ross Island. Little place off the coast of Antarctica. I think your people own it, whatever that’s worth.” He pointed towards the mountain. “That right there’s called Mt. Erebus.” In a surprisingly human gesture, the Physician pulled up his sleeve and glared at a wristwatch. “What’s keeping those friends of yours?”

David clapped his hands on Allison’s shoulders.  

“Boo!”

Allison laughed and pushed the boy back. “What took you so long?”

David was staring up at the sky, turning slowly like was trying to follow a bird in the air. “Others are being wimps about it.” He stared at the Physician. “Why didn’t you tell me you lived in the snow?”

“You never asked.”

David laughed and swept his arms. Huge wings of snow formed behind his back, while his suit frosted over like a lake in winter. Again he laughed, loudly and freely.

“Allie, look! I’m a snow angel!”

Allison snorted, grabbed David, and pointed. “Look, spaceship!”

“Ooh.” David and his suit exploded into a cloud of snow, instantly swept away by the wind.

“Where do you think he’s going?” asked the Physician absently.

“Dunno. Probably getting a closer look. He can go really fast when he’s not a person.”

She spent a few moments gazing up after the boy, then a thought struck.

“Wait. How does it handle atmosphere with all those fin-ey bits on the front?”

It was the first time she’d ever heard the Physician really laugh. It didn’t sound even remotely human. That made it a little less unpleasant, somehow.

“Ms. Kinsey. I don’t mean to sound rude, but species who still need to concern themselves with atmospheric friction really don’t have any business critiquing starship design.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Another laugh, like a dying refrigerator.

“Forcefields. When your people have been nipping in and out space as long as mine have, you can compromise a bit for aesthetics.”

“You care about aesthetics?”

“Oh, deeply. My time on Earth’s been spent in a complete state of shock.”

Allison wasn’t sure why, but she giggled at that. 

“Us too.”

The Physician made a popping noise. “Wait, did David take his clothing with him?”

“Oh, yeah,” Allison said, looking down at her suit. “Father Christmas said our costumes were super-special. Didn’t you see how David’s was all watery and stuff?”

The Physician’s whole skin went taut. “Pardon me. I had just assumed it was another piece of quaint fashion sense.”

“You’re bad at humans.”

“Quite. But let’s not get distracted. You said Santa Claus gave you these?”

There was a quiet thump in the snow behind them. Allison turned, and caught sight of Arnold kneeling in the snow, his arms tight around his ribs. He was shivering.

“Arnold!” She made it halfway into the first step, when a not quite human hand closed, vice-like, around her shoulder.

“You were telling me about Santa.”

“He’s freezing!”

“A body that size can survive these temperatures for upwards of thirty seconds without lasting damage. And even if he doesn’t, the cold will preserve—”

The Physician took a hasty step back as the heat began to vent from Allison’s form, blasting the snow around her into a metre wide ring of water that quickly sank into the pebbles below. She set her magma off to one side, and dashed to Arnold, as close as she dared.

Arnold’s teeth were chattering, even as the air around him rapidly began to warm. “Why’s—it so—c—c—cold?”   

“It’ll be alright, Arnold,” Allison called. “I’ll—”

Mabel and Billy dropped out of nothingness, and soon were both shivering like fever patients too, even with Billy’s fur working for him. 

“Where are we?” Mabel managed to get out, her question turning to mist and blown back in her face. 

Allison didn’t answer her question, instead yelling, “Get next to Arnold!”

Both children obeyed without question, shuddering as the warmth hit their systems like a drug. 

Allison looked back at the Physician, still standing there, his arm stuck out on a jagged, broken looking angle. She shouted, “Take them to the warm!” 

The Physician’s arm snapped back into place. “But they haven’t even gotten a good look— “

The magma hovered a foot or so towards the Physician.

“…You must let me have a look at that new power of yours, you kn—”

“Warm!”

“Fine, fine, fine.”

The Physician snapped his arms and legs to his sides, and opened his mouth unnaturally wide. Then his jaw slid down his torso, expanding his mouth until it filled most of his frame. 

Every cell in the Physician’s body screamed. Even with her toughened ear-drums, Allison had to clap her hands over her ears.

In the distance, a solid wall of snow slid down the face of Mt. Erebus. The Physician’s ship opened its eye. The air between its gaze and the children shimmered red. Their feet lifted off the ground. 

“What’s happening?” Allison asked. 

The Physician’s face was grinding and cracking back into a shape suitable for human speech. “Tractor-beam, young lady,” he said, flexing his jaw like he was checking to see if it fit properly. He hopped into the glow, snatched up by its power before his shoes hit the snow again. “Try to enjoy it.”

It was warm within the beam. Almost sauna-like. The ground cleaved farther and farther from the children as they were pulled upwards like fish caught in a riptide.

Allison leaned backwards against the air until she started tumbling head over heels, the vast plates of white and blue spinning around her. 

“Whee!”

Billy swam through the air in front of her, his cape rippling behind him like a proper superhero. At least someone was enjoying the trip.

After what could’ve been five minutes or an hour, they passed through the ship’s sullen, red eye. Allison screwed her eyes shut to shut out the glare and— 

The Physician and his students found their footing again under a sky of dark steel; studded with thousands of minute, softly shining gems like fossilized stars. 

Allison wiggled her toes. There was grass beneath her feet. 

The Physician dusted off his jacket and looked around. “Oh, we’re on the night-shift. I’ll fix it.” 

He made a circle with his pointer finger. The place rang in Allison’s ears like struck crystal. The mineral constellations above were obscured by the haze and flowering clouds of a bright, flaxen sky. There was no sun, but it was as if the air itself were charged with daylight. Dozens of trees rose from a sea of indigo grass, their branches lost in the sky; some were thinner than a human child, others had trunks like colossal marble columns. The whole field was rimmed by walls of rough, white stone.

Arnold gazed in complete wonder, remembering some of his mother’s idle speculations on the dimensions of Heaven. He looked at the Physician. “I thought you were taking us to your spaceship?”

“I did.” The Physician spread his arms out just a little too wide. “I think you would call this the lobby.”

Arnold turned around to find a copper circle exactly like the one back at Ravenscroft. He scowled, immediately rounding on Dr. Smith. “You could’ve taken us straight here, couldn’t you?”

“Of course I could’ve.”

“Then why’d you dump us in the middle of the North Pole?”

“Please, boy, the North Pole’s miles away.”

Arnold fumed and fidgeted. Billy was already running around the grass laughing when David coalesced from the ambient moisture.

“Hey guys! What took ya?”

“Freezing to death,” Mabel muttered, clutching her folder and art supplies. 

“Oh.”

The Physician clicked. “How’d you get in here, David? Ship’s airtight. It’s kind of the point of her.”

David smiled a secret smile. “There’s water in here, though.”

“Fair enough. I like your new eyes, by the way.”

David didn’t know if the Physician was being sly or just himself. He moved on. “It’s actually really neat in here—”

Fibrous, wrenching tearing. One of the larger trees cracked open at the base, widening to form a shadowed doorway. 

Allison gritted her teeth. A song was pouring out of the trunk. It was… at the very least, it belonged to the same album as the Physician’s. All the same impossible, twisting notes, the same harsh, mocking motifs, just arranged a little differently. The closest comparison Allison could make were Mels and David’s songs.

A woman emerged from the tree. She was taller than the Physician, bordering on six-foot-two, and wrapped in a ballooning black dress, with red-rimmed eye-glasses that could’ve served as air-foils. Her cobweb hair was done up in a thick beehive, though Allison would’ve expected to find spiders crawling through it before honeybees. Her long, orange painted nails could’ve sliced through steel.

She caught sight of the Physician, her eyes widening behind the thick lenses of her glasses to the size of saucers. “Dr. Smith!” 

Her Russian accent wouldn’t have been out of place in a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon. She slid towards the group. The way her body moved beneath her skirt, it looked less like she had two legs under there than a thick, solid serpent’s tail. A naga that had learned to walk.

The Physician grinned and gestured towards the lady. “Children, this is Dr. Sofia Ivanova. She handles superhuman science for the Soviets.” 

Arnold frowned. “Wait, she’s a commie?” he asked, a little of his father speaking through him.

“I haven’t joined the party yet, if that’s what you’re asking, little boy.” 

Dr. Ivanova leaned forward, examining the children. Up close, Allison noticed how grey her skin was. Where the Physician was jaundiced, this woman was just dead. “So, Smith, who are these dearies I’m looking at?”

“These boys and girls are from Herbert Lawrence’s kennel. Where I got Sinclair from.” The Physician gestured at each child in turn. “Sea-spawn, external teleporter, totemic animator, matter-manipulator, and that power-esper I mentioned.”

None of the children were sure what to make of that introduction. 

The Physician put his bony, rubbery hands on Allison and David’s shoulders. “These two’s clothes came from Father Christmas. What brings you shipside, by the way?”

Ivanova’s fingers squirmed like hungry worms. “Ooh, I’m jealous. And I was just getting reacquainted with myself.”

“May I say you look amazing?”

“You flatter me, John.” Ivanova slid over to a fungus-covered patch of rock-wall. It was like a mossy, checkered blanquet every colour of the gradient. She tapped away, each square glowing as she touched it. The copper circle bubbled. “I need to go. Science City One has a new shipment of nelyudi1 from Ukraine.”

Mabel watched her slip into the metal. “So… Is that your sister? Mother? Girlfriend?”

“Oh no. Dr. Ivanova is just me, and I am just her.” The Physician started towards one of the trees. “So, Christmas lunch?”  

1. A Russian term for superhuman that roughly translates to “inhuman.” Now commonly considered a slur. ↩

Previous Chapter                                                                                                           Next Chapter

  

Chapter Fifty-Seven: The Bacchanal at Harvey Dam

Book Three: This Hollow Season.

The children were up with the dawn next morning, eager to explore Allison’s new power before the campers woke up and the army of picnickers rolled in from Harvey.

Allison stood in front of her friends like she was about to defend a thesis. They’d found a remote, tree-shadowed corner of the dam, with a curled finger of water at their backs. Mabel had insisted they do it near the water.

“So…” David hopped from foot to foot. “You gonna start?”

Allison nodded. “Yeah.” 

She reached down, right into the depths of the Earth. She pulled. Heat rushed up through her feet, filling her to bursting. 

She grinned. She burned. 

Mabel and Billy oohed and ahhed. The boy crept slowly towards Allison. “Is it safe?”

“I wouldn’t get too close,” said Allison, her voice rippling with the hiss of superheated air. “Your fur might melt.”

Billy drew as near as he dared, walking around his friend and peering at her like a marble statue. She looked like a fire-fairy. 

“You’re pretty.”

Nobody but Allison could say if she was blushing. She jumped. “Thanks.” 

Something broke. The flames went out. 

Allison examined her arms. “Huh.”

“Why’d you stop?” asked David.

“I didn’t, it just—” The warmth flowed back into her, along with the fire. She sighed, not a little relieved. “I guess I shouldn’t jump when I’m doing this.”

It was funny, Allison thought. Usually she knew all about a power the moment she used it. Except, it seemed, her own.

“Come on!” Arnold jeered. “Show us the lava!”

Allison puffed out her chest. “You want lava?” She raised her hands over her head. “Here’s your lava!”

The magma fountained from her fingertips like water caught in the sun. Leaves on their branches were reduced to glowing skeletons by the convection.

Mabel gripped David’s hand, tilting her head anxiously towards the fires breaking out in the canopy.

David squeezed back. “Don’t worry.” 

Tentacles of water rose from the dam behind them, whipping at the burning trees and dousing the flames. 

The hiss of the steam gave Allison an idea. She tried grabbing David’s song, without letting go of the heat. Her fire became tinted absinthe green, while the lava twirled in strands around her arms and legs like gymnast’s ribbons. It felt like flexing her elbow. She gathered up David’s steam and froze it, skeining the tiny comets around the molten rock as they constantly exploded and reformed, caught between the heat and her insistence they remain ice. 

Smiling, Allison stuck out her leg, ready to dance, when her whole lava lattice wobbled. Drops of magma wept from its arches and spirals, boring pinprick holes in the dirt  before vanishing completely. Allison had to let go of the ice ice to keep the whole thing from collapsing, letting the water evaporate into the air.

The girl frowned. What, I can’t even move when I’m doing this?

She stepped forward cautiously, lifting her feet off the ground as little and as quickly as possible. That was much more manageable, but she still felt her grip falter.

Well that’s boring.

Next she tried weaving and pushing the lava away out from her body, aiming for a much more flammable version of Abalone’s force-domes. At about two meters, the strands of lava cooled and solidified like a stone cage over her, blowing away in the summer breeze.

Allison’s friends applauded, until David saw the disappointment her face.

“What’s the matter, Allie?”

Allison let her fire go out. “It’s not as fun as all your things.”

“Why not?” asked Mabel.

“You guys can run and use your powers. I have to stand still or I drop everything! It’s boring!” 

Arnold rolled his eyes. “Figures. You get a new forever-power and you whinge about it.”

Allison glared at Arnold and stamped her foot. “It’s not just that!” Her head drooped. “I can’t go fiery near anyone. I’d burn you.”

David smiled gently. “I know how it feels. You’re pretty much the only one I can bring underwater with me. Properly, I mean, not in a bubble or something.”        

Allison kicked the dirt. “That’s not the same. Fire’s scary.”

Privately, Mabel couldn’t help but agree with her.

Arnold and David shared an exasperated look. The water-sprite bent his knee, ready to take off running. “Hey, Allie, turn the fire back on, I wanna try something!”

Allison dutifully combusted. David turned icy and charged at the girl. 

Arnold, Mabel and Billy screamed and ducked for cover as their friend exploded in a shockwave of steam and ice-shards. 

Mabel lowered her arm from in front of her face. Jagged daggers of ice hung fixed in a wall of mist. She rolled over to see David bent laughing in the water. 

“You should’ve seen your faces!”

Allison was laughing, too. 

“Not funny,” Arnold muttered from between his knees.

Mabel smiled. “Eh, kinda funny.”

Billy was already on his feet, clapping. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Allie, your new power’s great! It’s like you’re a volcano goddess now!” 

“Pele?”

Billy grinned blanky. “Yeah, sure! Also, you and David really need to get some pants.”

David stopped laughing. “…Why?”

Billy folded his arms, doing his best impression of sternness. “Because two kids not wearing clothes at all is weird, and the naturals might notice. And if I have to walk around invisible half the time, you two can wear pants.”

“Seconded,” said Mabel. 

“But it’s a swimming spot!” complained David.

“Kids still wear clothes sometimes here,” Mabel retorted. 

Arnold glanced between David and Allison. “Yeah, it’s getting kinda… yeah.”

Allison shrugged. “They’ve got a point, Davie.”

“Looks like you’ve been outvoted, mate,” said Mabel.

David sighed. “Fiiiine. So where are we gonna get clothes?”

“I could try making some,” offered Billy.

“Nah,” said Allison. She was looking past the other children at the shadows tomorrow cast on today. That still took getting used to. A couple of the silhouettes were familiar. She smiled. “I know where we can get some good clothes from.”

Where. Who. Allison didn’t see much of a distinction.

⬗

For the extended Walsh-Zieliński-Cancio clan, Christmas Day in 1965 fell on December 23rd. It was the only day that month where a worthwhile number of relatives could be gathered at Harvey Dam for the perfunctory holiday barbecue. 

Jenny Cancio had left her father and uncles to drink and mechanically turn cheap meat over hot coals, while her mother and aunts tried and failed to brag about their children without each other catching on. Jenny was going to be an entomologist (or as she thought of it, “bug scientist”) when she grew up, and so needed a constant supply of specimens. 

The little girl sat cross legged in front of a densely populated congregation of red bottlebrushes. She was a thin child, her warm brown hair ruthlessly bound into pigtails, with enough freckles vying for space beneath her glasses that they almost formed into leopard spots. Given the time and place in which she was born, it was perhaps a blessing that Jenny Cancio had been born without much self-consciousness.    

A banana yellow beetle crawled onto the back of the girl’s hand. Jenny grinned and called behind her, “Matt! Christmas beetle! I think that’s good luck or something!”

Matthew Zieliński looked up from the nowhere-map he was drawing in the dirt, nodded, and went right back to his art. He was Jenny’s favourite cousin. Mostly it was a matter of geography—they were in the same class at school. He was also borderline mute, though Jenny would argue he was only quiet the way cave-paintings were. 

“This one’s up really early for a Christmas beetle,” Jenny explained. “I wonder if it’s hungry?”

Matt maintained a kindly silence while he traced out sea-serpents. It wasn’t that he was uninterested, he just knew Jenny would furnish her own answers. 

“You know that by the time Christmas beetles come out of their cocoon things, their parents are dead?” Jenny smiled wickedly to herself. “Be kinda fun if that was how it worked with people.”

Without looking up from his drawings, Matt smiled, too.

Watching the beetle climb up her arm, its legs pricking at her skin, Jenifer pondered cocoons, as was her way. They made more sense to her than how human beings grew up. More delineated. From what little adults had told her, people just sort of… stretched. 

A sharp intake of breath. Matt’s silence changed timbre. 

Jenny turned around. “Matt, what’s the—oh.”

Matthew was on his feet, gawking at a naked girl with skin like cold, smudged bone. It also seemed someone had set her eyes on fire, not that she looked bothered by it. 

The Christmas beetle took off from Jenny’s arm, clumsily fleeing through the air. 

“Um, hi?”

“Hello Jenny.”

“How do you know my name?”

Allison tilted her head. Jenny and Matt had been in class with her since kindergarten. They were sort of friends, in so much as Allison had ones whose names weren’t Arnold. It helped that she was the one child in Harvey who knew as much as Jenny about bugs, at least after she met her, that was. How did they not recognize her? Had she changed so much?

Allison folded her arms and tried to smile mysteriously. “You just look like a Jenny, that’s all.”

Jenny smoothed her saffron dress nervously over her knee. She could swear the girl was eyeing it, with those two burning coals of hers. “Do I?”

The girl shrugged. “I guess.”

“Are you a demi? Like from the news?”

Like your classmate? Allison thought sourly to herself. “I—”  

“Nah, she’s a fairy!”  A tiger shaped like a boy was hanging upside down from a bark tree, his legs and tail hooked around its strongest branch. He jumped down, stuck the landing, and ran at the other children. “So am I!”

Jenny screamed. Matt squealed. 

“Kitty-boy!” Matt pulled said kitty-boy into a hug. “Look, Jenny, caaaat!” 

Jenny didn’t hear her cousin. She was too busy pacing and sharing her fears with the ground. “They’re supervillains! They probably blew up Parliament, or they’re from the Coven! Or both!” She stopped in place and screwed her eyes shut. “They’re gonna get us!”   

Allison sighed. Looked like they were going to have to rewind and start over. As she started moving towards Jenny, Billy shook his head at her. 

Let me handle it, he thought very loudly. He looked at the panicked girl. “Jenny, I promise me and”—he thought quickly— “Hesperis aren’t supervillains. I told ya, we’re dam fairies.”

Allison was quietly impressed, more by the name than “dam fairies.”

Jenny looked back up at Billy, her eyes red and wet. She sniffled. “Can you prove it?”

Billy grinned. “Sure can! Fairies can do magic, right?”

Matt nodded enthusiastically. More warily, Jenny answered “Yeah…”        

“Well,” said Billy, “name something you want. Anything!”

Jenny pondered the offer. “A bug ring.”

Allison was still trying to figure out what a bug ring was when Billy conjured up a wisp of mirror-mist and snatched something out out of it in one fluid motion. He got down on one knee and held his arm out to Jenny like he was proposing. “M’lady.”

He opened his palm to reveal a diamond ring. Not a common gold ring with a few diamonds embedded in it (that would be cheating) but a band of molecularly pure, clear cut crystal, a darkly glinting black Hercules beetle curled around it.

“Ooh.” Jenny slipped the ring on her index finger and held it up to the sun, letting it catch ablaze with light. “You are fairies!”

Allison peered into her old classmate’s mind, trying to figure out how that display seemed particularly “fairy”. All she got was a confabulation of excited pink explosions.

“Glad we’re on the same page!” said Billy, swiping his first jovially. He called out, “Oh, Triton!”

  David emerged from the local humidity. To anyone who didn’t know that, he materialised from thin air. His eyes were on full glow. “Hello!”

 Triton? Allison thought to herself. He doesn’t even have a fishtail!

Jenny offered a hand to David, grinning broadly. “Pleased to meet you, Triton!”

Philistines.

David bent and pecked the girl’s hand. “Enchantée.”

Jenny giggled. French really is a terrible weapon.

Matt’s nose wrinkled. “Hey, why are you two naked but Kitty—”

Billy clarified, “Tom Tildrum.”

Allison tried to hide her distaste. It was easier now you couldn’t truly see her eyes.

 “…But Tom Tildrum wears clothes?”

Billy patted his shorts. “Pockets!”

“Overrated,” said David. He looked out towards the dam waters and smiled back at Jenny. “Wanna go swimming?”

“Sure!”

And so the fairies led the two human children off into the wild.

⬖

Bradley Cancio had set off to find his daughter and nephew at lunchtime. Now it was nearly 7 o’clock, and the sun had nearly set over Harvey Dam—evening blue swallowing the orange horizon like the sand at high tide—and Bradley Cancio was still searching.

“Jenny!” the man called out into the indifferent, gathering gloom. “Matt! Kids, please, this isn’t funny!”

Mr. Cancio stopped and stared around the darkness, hoping desperately for any unaccounted wrinkle of shadow, but all he found were the frantic silhouettes of his own family fruitlessly searching velvet trees. 

Someone needs to head back to town, Bradley thought. Get the police over here. 

He stomped into the water, as though those few feet were all that were keeping him from spotting the kids out on the lake.

But if the cops are involved, than the kids will be Lost, and then— 

“Hi Dad.”

Bradley swung around in the direction of his daughter’s voice. “Jenny?”

The little girl and her cousin emerged from a crowd of wattle trees, hand in hand. They were both naked, bar Jenny’s glasses and a couple clear bands around her fingers, almost invisible in the dim.

“Jenny!” Bradley ran to the two children, almost knocking them over as he embraced them. “For Christ’s sake, we thought we lost you!” He looked both children in the eye, trying and failing to look annoyed. “You were supposed to be back at lunchtime. Where the hell were you?”

“With the fairies,” Matt answered simply. 

Jenny glared at him. The fairies hadn’t explicitly asked for their secrecy, but it seemed like the done thing. 

“The fairies,” Bradley said flatly. “Where’d you leave your clothes.”

Well, now that Matt had spilled it already… “The fairies needed them.”

Mr. Cancia shook his head. “They needed your clothes?” 

“Yeah,” said Matt. “Didn’t seem like a big ask.”

If it had been any other month, in any other year, Bradley Cancio might have been able to write it off. Not with the Flying Man still in the sky, and Parliament House still smoking.

Not when they’d taken his daughter’s clothes.

⬗

Cities of glass, where people made of song rode on wings of laughter. Great eagles that flew through the winds of gas giants. Walking mounds of flesh, begging twin suns in a dry sky for rain—  

An archly bitter voice spat, “Seen it!”

Allison woke with a start, in the dark of her stolen tent. David lay asleep beside her, dutifully clad in Matthew Zieliński’s cargo shorts and footy jersey. 

Matt and Jenny had been alright, Allison thought hazily. Fun, even. Maybe she ought to have paid them more attention, back when she thought she was human. 

Bells. Silver bells. They rang randomly, without any rhythm. But there was a song, too. Drums, deep, slow, and resounding. The tune was familiar, in a way that made Allison’s bones hum. And something was glowing beyond the tent-flaps, like a fire on the other side of a blizzard.

Dreamily, Allison crawled out of the tent. What few scraps of sky the trees let reach her were a tired, dawn grey. Kookaburras rang in the morning with their raucous conversation.

Allison shivered from the cold. She hadn’t done that since she’d taken on Eliza’s improvements. How could it be so cold in high summer?

Just beyond their copse, by the water, there stood a man. He was taller than life, and almost as broad. He wore a thick, hooded fur suit, dyed bright red with trim as white as his beard. A sleigh was parked next to him, while enormous, burly reindeer drank from the dam, bells on their collars ringing with every twitch of their necks.         

Father Christmas caught sight of the girl and smiled warmly. “Merry Christmas, Allison Kinsey.”

Allison teared up just looking at the man. He wanted to bury her face in his chest, and confess  every bad thing she had ever done. Every lie; every neglected kindness; every cruel comment. For burning that pointless, powerless old man, and for what she had done to Alberto.

Was that even a bad thing? She didn’t—

“Santa?”

Allison turned to find her friends all standing behind her, staring at Father Christmas just as she had been. 

The old man nodded. “It’s as good as name as any.”

The children ran at him, embracing him. All except for David. He just stood and watched.  

Billy was laughing. Arnold and Mabel were weeping.    

“I’m sorry,” Mabel moaned. “I didn’t mean to—”

Father Christmas sighed and stroked her hair. “Oh, child. Circle’s End was nobody’s fault.”

Mabel didn’t stop weeping. Father Christmas wasn’t surprised. He was far from the first to try and convince her of that.

Arnold stammered between sobs. “I made this happen, should’ve known…” 

“That was another’s crime, Arnold. Herbert Lawrence would’ve found some other way to leave a scar on the world even if you’d never been born.”

Allison tensed. She didn’t have to tell Father Christmas what she was thinking. Nobody had to tell him that. All he said to her was, “Some wouldn’t even feel sorry.”

Old Saint Nick gently removed himself from the hug. “Now, I’ve got some presents for you all.” he took a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles and a scroll from within his jacket, donning the glasses and clicking his tongue as he let the parchment fall open in front of him. “Let’s see now.”

He walked over to his sleigh, hoisting one-handed an enormous, green sack onto the grass and pulling loose the silver cord that held it closed. He fished out three gift-wrapped, bow topped boxes, and casually tossed two of them towards Billy and Allison. The girl caught hers effortlessly, while the boy flinched and let his fall to the ground.

Billy scrambled to pick his up. “Sorry, sorry!”

Father Christmas let out a laugh that should need no description. “No harm done, son!”

With the third present under his arm, he marched over to David. The water-sprite looked up at him warily. 

“I apologise for the resemblance, sea-spawn.” He patted his belly and laughed once more. “Us bearded patriarchs, we all look much the same.” 

“I don’t care,” muttered David. “I’m not scared of him anymore.”

“I know you’re not. But nonetheless.”

“…And don’t make fun of yourself like that,” David added. “Laurie always did that. Like he wasn’t completely full of it.”

Father Christmas nodded. “I will remember that.” His expression became businesslike. “Now, son, you’re not on either of my lists. Those are for mortal children.” He handed the present to David. “But this is the season for giving.”

“Thanks, I think.” 

Father Christmas put a hand on his shoulder. “Besides, you’ve been a very good boy. Too good, for too long.” He bent till he was at eye level with the boy. “Just remember, boy, there is such a thing as overcorrecting.”

He glanced around at the children. “You can open them, you know. It’s been Christmas morning for hours.” 

Slow, vaguely reverent unwrapping, lasting much longer than David’s quick tearing. The three boxes all held the same contents: an aggressively plain grey bodysock. 

David poked at the clothing like it was a dead jellyfish. “More clothes?”

“Hey, those are life-fibres. Had to fly to the moon of Scrool to get them. They might not look like much now, but wait till you try them on.” Father Christmas looked at Billy. “The tail’s been accommodated for, son.”

Billy spent a moment double checking the single-piece bodysuit to see whether a tail hole had magically appeared, then, not wanting to gainsay Santa himself, said:

“Thank you, sir.”

Father Christmas walked back to his sack, pulling out more gifts. “Now, Mabel, Arnold, don’t think I’ve forgotten about you.” He beckoned the two close to him.

The pair approached cautiously. 

Father Christmas addressed Mabel first. “Now I heard you want to be an artist,” he said handing her a black bound drawing book and a set of colour pencils.

Mabel took her gifts and shrugged, “I’m trying.”

Father Christmas tapped the girl on the forehead. An electric chill ran down her spine.

“And you’ve been rewarded.”

To Arnold he gave a large, handsomely bound volume. Its face bore a tree growing from a river, in whose branches rested a maiden and several planets, below the gilded title:

A BARNES FAMILY COSMIC ATLAS

Arnold tried to suppress a frown. He’d never been the kind of boy who relished getting a book for Christmas.

“Do give it a chance, Arnold. I had to do a great deal of research.” Father Christmas closed his sack and threw it back onto the sleigh. “When you children move on from here—and you will, soon—I suggest going to page 234.” He climbed into the sleigh’s seat and grabbed hold of the reins. The reindeer had been harnessed to the sleigh, when and by who the children could never guess.

“You’re going?” asked Billy.

“Afraid so, William. Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t let the sun rise or a child’s waking eyes fall on me, but rules are rules.” Father Christmas raised his hand. “Now, I suggest you all get a few more hours of sleep before you play with your presents.” 

He snapped his fingers. Sleep pulled the children under, again, except for David.

“Goodbye, David. It was nice seeing you children all again. Say hello to your grandfather for me when you see him.”

David waved. “Sure—wait, my grandfather?”

The sleigh was already in the air, booming laughter echoing throughout Harvey Dam.

⬖

When Allison woke again, David was crouching in front of her. He was naked again, which didn’t surprise her terribly. Before she could say “good morning” or ask the obvious question, he said:

“Merry Christmas, Allie! Nope, that wasn’t a dream, Santa really did turn up.”

Allison laughed. “Really?” It honestly didn’t shock her too hard. A childhood in the western world had well and truly prepared Allison for this meeting.

“Yep. Left us stupid magic-I-guess clothes.” David picked up one of the bodysocks. “Wanna try them on before the others wake up?”

“Sure!”

At Allison’s cajoling, David slipped his on first. “I don’t get what’s so special about em,” David muttered, apparently unaware that the aquatic glow normally reserved for his and Allison’s eyes was rapidly spreading across the length and breadth of the fabric. “They don’t feel all that—”

Then he noticed.

“Allie!” he yelped. “I’m glowing! Help!”

The request wasn’t really needed. Before he’d even finished the sentence, Allison’s shoulder caught him in the waist as she tackled him to the floor, already fumbling with the costume’s neckline. There was just one problem there. There wasn’t a neckline anymore, no seam dividing fabric from skin. The glow spread. Allison let out a panicked squeak as, for a moment, the glow seemed to cover the entirety of David’s form, before, less than a second later, it was gone. In its place, looking quite unharmed, if a little shaken, was David. The costume was still there too. It just wasn’t grey anymore.

“… Why are you covered in waves?”

“Yo-I-what?” David spluttered. “I’m wearing-” he looked at his hands. “… Huh.”

It was a strange effect, all said, the fabric shifting and flowing across the boy’s skin, colors moving gently between deep oceanic greens and a softer navy blue, dotted occasionally by brief glimpses of white that could have been either bubbles or sea foam. It looked less like a costume and more like he was simply wearing the sea. Occasionally, if you looked closely enough, you could see what might have been a flash of scales. A mermaid’s fin. 

“I like it,” said Allison. “You gotta admit, it’s pretty.”

David was twisting around trying to get a good look at the suit. “Yeah, it is.” David mostly regarded clothing the same way a fish would, but if he were going to wear anything, it could at least look nice. On a whim, he evaporated into mist, reforming a second later. The suit followed suit.

“Woah,” said Allison. “How did Santa make that work?”

David looked worried for a second. “You don’t think—”

He misted again. This time, his new clothes simply flowed off him, forming first a puddle, then a pile of fabric on the floor. He became flesh again, looking relieved “Phew, thought I was stuck wearing clothes forever.” He shuddered, but he also put the suit back on.

Allison laughed. “Okay, my turn!” 

She threw off Jenny’s dress and pulled her suit on excitedly. For several long seconds, it stayed grey. 

“… Hey, no fai—”

Then her clothes exploded in a blinding flash of crimson light. Had Allison not been making a habit of that, David would have been very concerned that she had just caught fire. 

He grinned.

“Maybe Santa clothes aren’t the worst present ever.”

The glowing figure that was Allison gave an excited little skip.

“It’s gonna be so cool, it’s gonna be so—”

Quite abruptly, the glow faded, revealing what, to David’s perspective, had to be the dumbest costume anyone had ever seen.

It was an outfit Joseph would have been proud of1. Colourful, in a word. The whole outfit was an explosion of reds, purples, and greens, in bold defiance of any sort of pattern. The top was a jerkin shaped mess of swirling blues, smokey whites, and pale purples, all surrounding the multicoloured, many pointed star of the Nine Muses emblazoned on her chest. David hadn’t  even known you could tie-dye leather2. The sleeves and bell-trousers meanwhile were dominated by swirls of coral pink, yellow, and orange. The entire ensemble looked designed to offend the mere notion of quiet. 

“…I take it back,” he said. “You look really—”

“This,” Allison cut him off, “is, awesome!” She bared her teeth and growled. “I am Allison, queen of the rainbow-pirates!” She burst back into flames. Her new outfit caught alight too, but did not burn, the streaks of colour glowing bright. “The fire rainbow-pirates!”

David grinned. Whatever his thoughts on clothing thicker or more cumbersome than bare skin, Allison’s glee was infectious. 

Allison glanced around the campsite, eager to wake everyone up and show off. Arnold and Mabel were curled around their presents like slumbering, tiny dragons, but she couldn’t find Billy.

“Where’s Billy gone?” she asked David.

“Oh, he went to go try his on—”

“Dadadada…”   

Billy came barrelling out of the trees. 

“Tada!”

For roughly five seconds, neither David nor Allison laughed. It was too cute. It was Allison, however, who broke first.

“… You don’t like it?” he asked, his furry face crumpling in disappointment as the girl giggled.

“No,” she snorted. “I do! I really do… but where’s the rest of the Famous Five?”

Billy glowered at her.

“I am not a Famous Five!”

David, quite wisely, chose not to comment.

“It has so many pockets! And look!” he turned around. “Tail slot!” he pointed to the top of his shorts, where, true to Santa’s word, there was indeed a small hole cut out to make room for his tail. His cape was a navy blue while his top was a relatively plain white polo-shirt of all things, with a high, stiff collar, and what looked like a gold philosopher’s stone symbol, but with the inner circle replaced by a smiling cat face. The costume also came with a blue domino mask, so nobody would know that the super-boy with tiger-fur and a tail was William St. George.  

“It’s so comfy!” Billy’s eyes were darting around like he was looking for an adventure to dive into. 

Mabel began to stir, and like a contagion, so did Arnold. The boy blinked blearily at his costumed friends. “Not a dream?”

“Nope!” replied Billy.

“Morning, Arn,” said David. “Father Christmas made clothes a bit less crap.”

Mabel had well and truly woke up. “You guys look great!” 

Allison was posing. “I know I—ah, crap!” Her hand went to her temples. “Stupid grownups!”

Mabel rushed to her side. “What’s wrong.”

Allison’s eyes narrowed darkly. “I thought about showing this off to some kids later and, bam, angry mob!”

“Angry mob?” asked Arnold.

“Matt and Jenny’s folks,” clarified Allison. “They’ve got everyone in town all angry because we took their clothes.” She kicked the air. “Grownups are weird. They’ll be here in a couple hours.”

Arnold shook his head. “Who goes all angry mob on Christmas?”

“Grinches?” suggested Mabel.

“So what do we do?” asked David. “Do we fight them?”

Mabel shook her head firmly. “No. No more fighting.”

“Then where do we go?” asked Allison. “I bet there’s still DDHA gits looking for us.”

Arnold thought about it. “Father Christmas said something about… page 214 I think?”

 “Two hundred and thirty-four,” Allison corrected him. 

Arnold flipped through the atlas. Some of the locales were sensical enough. New York City, Sydney, the Amazon Rainforest. But then where were the skerries of Dream, or the Emu Collective of Campion3, and what the hell were the Riverlands supposed to be? 

He found his page. Arnold looked up at his friends. “Ravenscourt Manor.”

David groaned. “Figures.”

Allison sighed. “Let’s get what we want to take and get going.”

⬗

Australia had very few castles, and all of them were infants even by the low standards of human construction. The aboriginal nations had neither the material capacity or the urge for castle building, and by the time the white men arrived, they too had mostly lost their taste for it. But still, some had been built on that continent: as tourist traps, monuments, or even as homes. 

Ravenscourt Manor had been one such castle, transported brick by brick from Britain to South Australia by the ailing, but still too rich for their own health, Ashley family in the 1860s4. It was a petty castle by most standards—a casual observer might’ve written it off as just a stone mansion—but a castle it was. 

It had seen better days. The earth was eating its ramparts, and its edifice was wearing away like enamel from an old tooth. Birds swooped in and out of broken windows. The estate’s trees were all Old World transplants, bare of branch despite the summer weather. Just a couple of months before, the trees had been clad in bright, autumnal oranges. In the middle of spring.        

 David, Mabel, and Billy appeared at the rusting gates in a green flash, clutching (or wearing) their Christmas presents. A couple seconds later, so did Arnold and Allison.

“This the place?” asked the latter.

“Yeah,” said David. “I’ll do the talking.”

Arnold blasted the gates into the core of Neptune, and the children started hiking up to the entrance of Ravenscourt. 

Living scarecrows lumbered through the gardens, turning and staggering towards the children as they walked. They paid them little mind. Arnold just teleported them whenever they got close.

Eventually, they reached the tall front door. David knocked demandingly. He could hear music through the thick oak, even place the song. “Butcher Pete” by Roy Brown.

After what felt like half of all time, the door cracked open.

His face hard and set, David said, “My parents are dead. All the other kids are dead. I think people are hunting for us.”

The Physician’s grin was stiller than the stone of his home. “Well, come inside then, children.”

“Turn this record over, you ain’t seen nothing yet!” 

1. At least in less adept translations of Genesis. ↩

2. You cannot. ↩

3. Probably Campion. ↩

4. The Ashley family were English nobility who sold their land (but kept the title of earl of Ravenscourt) and relocated to Australia after shearing and mining interests in the mid 19th century. Their last scion—the 16th Earl of Ravenscourt—would fight crime as a masked vigilante known uncreatively the Raven after being betrayed and driven from his home by his brother Sebestian. Both men would later disappear during a confrontation in a burning Adelaide warehouse in 1947. Many superhero scholars have suggested that the later Perthite vigilante the Wight drew inspiration from the Raven. ↩

Previous Chapter                                                                                                           Next Chapter

Chapter Fifty-Six : The Brauronia of Allison Kinsey

Book Three: This Hollow Season.

“Whether or not the mooches and parasites wish to admit it, the days of the mediocre pinning down the exceptional beneath state and church are over. The Flying Man did not heed the whining of politicians and so called ‘patriots’ when he snatched the atom from their fumbling hands, and neither shall the rest of his kind. The true superman’s only code is their own will and ambition, and the base and common live at their sufferance—“

Timothy Valour switched off the tape-player. Ayn Rand was a powerful motivator, but only in very precise doses1.

It was nearly two in the morning, but pale blue light was slicing through the gap in Valour’s new office curtains. Between the streetlights and fluorescent lamps leering from every high rise window in Melbourne, it was as though dawn had snuck past the wall of night.

When what was left of Australian Parliament fled from Canberra to its Victorian birthplace, Timothy Valour of course had followed. Someone had to hold things together. Not that he would’ve claimed to be doing a good job. 

Valour hadn’t seen his own bed in days. Whenever he tried picturing his wife or his house (whether intact or burned and blasted) all that came to him was more paperwork, lined with terse, official prose that failed to mask the panic bleeding from every word like wet ink. His life had been reduced to urgent, frantic meetings with shell-shocked politicians and angry Americans with hungry eyes. At least the mother country was keeping its distance, for now.

Operation Prometheus had turned into a massacre. Every student at the New Human Institute was dead or missing. Agent Moretti has been killed, his body whisked away by the Americans before a coroner could get a look in. Major Yerrick, Tim’s last surviving war buddy, was found burned to death, his flesh mingled with molten rock. The only soldier who’d returned from the mission was Françoise Barthe’s assassin, and Tim didn’t even want to think about what had become of him.

One of those facts was about to change.

Tim was still enough of a soldier to notice when the shouting started seeping through his window. He didn’t even have time to check before his young secretary barged in, all decorum forgotten.

“Sir, I think you need to see this.”

Almost the entire overburdened night-shift had spilled out onto the front lawn of the provisional DDHA Headquarters. They were pointing and gawking at dozens of hogtied soldiers, screaming and thrashing against their rough rope bindings.

And above it all, the Flying Man, floating in the night sky.

Timothy slowly approached the one bound man who wasn’t wearing a uniform. He was well past fighting age, clad in a ruined green suit and sporting a washed out red beard. 

Tim tried to resist kicking the old man. “Herbert,” he spat.

Dr. Lawrence stared up at his former friend with resigned, wet eyes. “I’m sorry, Tim.”

Timothy didn’t answer him, instead turning his gaze up towards the Flying Man. The superhuman was looking down at the crowd with open contempt. Tim felt like he was looking right at him. Maybe he was.

Tim shouted up at the sky. “What the hell do you want from me?” The shout became a scream, “What was I supposed to do!”

Joe Allworth gave no answer, his shadow shrinking against the Moon as he left the old soldier alone in the crowd.

⬗

On a dark, grassy shore, three children came into existence. They were very confused.

David shouted, “Where are we?”

Billy looked desperately at Mabel. “Did we do something wrong? Why’d Allie zap us?”

“How should I know?” Mabel yelled back, regretting it immediately as the tiger-boy burst into tears.

Another green flash lit the night, depositing Arnold and Allison amongst the children. They were holding hands. 

Mabel jumped backwards, dropping her picture-binder before shaking off the shock and marching up to Allison, scowling right in her face. “What the hell, Allie?”

Allison blinked dazedly at Mabel. The other girl’s face was tattooed with bold, angular chains of nested cubes and chevrons, flowing and interlocking with each other like drakes of architecture. They glowed bright pink in the morning, pulsing softly in the morning dark with the faintest ice-blue edging. Had they been there before?

Allison swayed on her feet. “Sorry, Mabs. Had to get you somewhere safe?”

“Safe from what?”

“The soldiers, the Flying Man,” answered Allison absently.

“What?” David asked. “The Flying Man was there? What was he doing?”

Allison looked at the water-sprite. She could see all of him now, all at once. The brown little boy, the water, the ice…

“Dunno,” she said. “Gosh, you’re pretty, David.”

David wrinkled his nose and looked at Arnold questioningly. “What’s wrong with Allie? Her eyes…”

“I—I don’t know.” The boy wrapped a balancing arm around Allison’s bare torso. “She just said we needed to leave and we teleported each other.”

Allison looked at Arnold. His presentation was far more modest than Mabel and David’s: a simple calligraphic mark inscribed on his forehead in glowing lime ink. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before, or why he was talking about her like she wasn’t there.

Now it was Billy’s turn to hurl questions at Allison. “What’s happening at school? Is Dawnie and everyone okay?”

Allison just stared at the boy. He was tattooed like Mabel, perfectly visible through his fur. His markings were disjointed, haphazard jumbles of green and pink, yellow and purple. Some sections were sharp and straight, others layered and jumbled like broken Chinese puzzle balls. They didn’t interface so much as run into each other. Messy, but it worked.

“Allie?”

Allison shuddered. “Sorry. They’re dead.”

Arnold almost dropped her. The other children began squawking questions at Allison like a flock of troubled birds. 

Allison was transfixed. She had always been able to hear feelings in songs, but now she could see them, too. Sour constellations of anger, confusion and fear ignited in her friends’ heads—coherent, beautiful patterns rising from bright and shining chaos like a symphony of stars.

Mabel was shaking her. “What do you mean, ‘dead’?”

“I mean…”

Allison slipped from Arnold’s grip, falling like a stone to the thin, rugged grass. 

She never knew fear could be so beautiful.

⬖

Allison dreamt for what felt like aeons. She dreamt of the silent beauty of lonely stars, scattered over wild, endless voids, where kinder things than she knew swam through the dark. Of worlds of black diamond, cracked with gleaming, white hot rivers. Of fonts in space-time pouring light and matter back out into creation. Of the naked hearts of dead suns, so dense the walls of atoms crumbled within them, and single seconds stretched on forever.

Sometimes Allison’s dreams were pulled back down to Earth. She found herself playing on narrow cobbled streets smothered with the scent of freshly baked bread and hot cassoeula. Or she would be sitting across from frightened old men and brave young fools in dark rooms, while black-shirted werewolves stood waiting to be fed. 

Then the cosmic would fall upon the provincial like starlight, and she would be playing hide and seek with a golden haired nymph in the canyons of the moon, or swimming after her in the corona of the sun.

“Wake up.”

Allison ignored the scolding male voice, chasing the nymph—or was that David?—through the river of the Milky Way, her graceful limbs sweeping through stars and worlds like water.

“Wake up!”

Allison jerked awake. She was lying on a thick bed of leaves, sunlight dappling down on her through a thick canopy of branches that filtered the sky like Ventian glass. It dimly reminded Allison of her arboreal cathedral back at Parliament House.

“Allie!” 

Before Allison could say anything, Mabel yanked her up into a bear-vice of a hug.

“We thought you weren’t ever gonna wake up!”

Allison managed to replace some of the air Mabel knocked out of her. “…Hey Mabs. How long was I asleep?”

“A whole day!” Mabel called out, “Guys, Allie’s awake!”

Broken twigs and cracking leaves beneath hurrying feet. Billy and Arnold almost knocked the girls to the ground. 

Arnold sounded on the brink brink of tears as he embraced them. “You’re okay!

Billy just nuzzled his fur against Allison’s cheek. She sank into the hug.

The fur pulled away. “Oh, your eyes are still doing the thing.”

Allison blinked at Billy. “What thing?”

“Um…” Mabel stepped back and conjured a hand-mirror, surprisingly reflective for something rendered in oils. She held it up to her friend’s face.

Allison’s eyes glowed bright like fresh dragon’s blood, the whites lost in their red glare. 

She tried making them go hazel again. They didn’t.

“Does it hurt?” Arnold asked. “Can you still see alright?”

She could. That almost surprised Allison. Shouldn’t it be like trying to see with a torch in her face? Then again, it never seemed to bother—

“Where’s David?”

“Allie, your eyes are glowing.”

“Where is he?” Allison asked again.

Mabel waved her hand. “He’s playing with some kids from town.”

“Town? Where are we?”

Arnold tilted his head. “What? How do you not know? The Dam was your idea.”

“The d—wait, Harvey Dam?”

Allison remembered now. She remembered a lot of things. She started walking towards the edge of the trees. “I need to find David, alright?”

Mabel tried to follow her. “Allie, wait! Before you went to sleep, you said everyone was—“

Allison looked back at the other girl with burning, plaintive eyes. “I know, but can I just find David first? I… it’s not something I want to have to talk about over and over.”

Mabel stopped. “…Yeah, sure. Be careful, okay?l

She watched Allison go. Arnold walked up next to her. “What do you think’s wrong with her eyes?”

“No idea,” said Mabel.

“Maybe it’s a growing up thing?” suggested Billy. “Like getting taller or…” He gestured vaguely around his chest.

Arnold shrugged. “Probably should’ve gotten her pants or something.”

“Or sunglasses,” Mabel added warily.

⬗

When she woke up (because of course she would) David thought to himself, he really ought to thank Allison for zapping them all to Harvey Dam. The place was full of hidden, green corners to explore. And the water itself—he hadn’t gotten to swim so deep since Lake Burley Griffin. Still fresh and bland on his tongue, but full of life and current nonetheless. 

Even more wonderful, though, was the company. As it turned out, Harvey Dam was very popular with families in the summer. And children on holiday didn’t much question a naked, strangely accented coloured boy sharing the water with them.

“Go long, David!

Liam tossed a rugby ball over the waist-deep water. He was a chubby, pale boy, with frizzy red hair that settled on top of his head like a damp sponge.

David ran backwards through the squishy lake mud like he was trying to keep apace with a falling star. He just managed to snatch the ball out of the air before it splashed down. In so doing, David himself overbalanced, falling into the murk with a wet ‘splat’. He popped back up a moment later, grinning ear to ear.

David threw the ball over his head in triumph. It was the first time he’d actually played rugby, or football as Liam insisted on calling it. Soccer—never by that name when Alberto was in earshot—had always been the preeminent game of choice at the New Human Institute. David had never felt so… Aussie. 

“Goal!”

Liam sighed. “I told you, David, footy doesn’t work that way.”

“And I told you to stop saying my name all English, so nhyyaa!” He poked his tongue at the other boy.

“Aww, lay off him,” said Liam’s sister Gwen, floating on her back. She was as pale and red haired as her older brother, but her eyes were a shade of green that almost matched David’s, much to his amusement. It somewhat perplexed the boy why she wore a one piece while her brother could get away without a shirt, but he was used to humans being weird about that sort of thing.

“Besides,” she said, “not like there’s goalposts in the water. And David’s all foreign anyway. Maybe that’s what it looks like over in… where’d you say you were from?” 

David was looking very smug. “France!” he answered cheerily. 

It was strange, hearing strangers use his real name, without having to be told it wasn’t Maelstrom or Mealy or whatever other stupid nickname stupid people called him. Strange and amazing.

Gwen thrashed suddenly, her lower half falling under the water. “Gaaah!”

“What’s the matter?” asked David.

Gwen regained her bearings. “I think a fish brushed me.”

Liam sniggered. “What a girl—aaaaugh!” The boy kicked violently. “Something grabbed me!”

A little girl broke the surface next to David, fish-pale with water-dark chestnut hair and eyes like magma. 

She grinned. “There you are, David!”

The boy tensed. What was Allison thinking? You didn’t see him walking around with glowing eyes in front of the naturals. He hadn’t even used his powers anymore than it took to be the winner of any and all splash fights. And why hadn’t he noticed Allison in the water?

Liam was scowling at the girl. “You didn’t have to be grabby, kid.”

David tilted his head. Were Harvey children the masters of tact, or was he severely misinformed about the range of human eye colours?

Gwen seemed to be taking it with better humour than her brother. “Oh, you know David?”

No comment on the eyes from her, either.

David decided to make the introduction. “Guys, this is—”

Allison threw her arm around David’s shoulders. “His cousin, Mary-Anne.”

David blinked at her, before an insistent, very familiar voice inside him hissed:

Go along with it! I knew these kids from before!

You did?

Yeah. Gwen was in my class. She always bragged about getting free ice-cream ‘cause her daddy owns the dairy. I think that’s why her brother—

The thought-line broke off. David got the vague mental image of Allison shaking her head.

Anyway, don’t want them knowing it’s me.

David thought, But why don’t they recognise you? He squinted at the McNally siblings, much to their confusion. They aren’t blind, are they? Another question hit him like a wave. Wait, are you brain-speaking? How do you still have Alberto’s—

I’ll tell you when the humans are gone, okay?

“Huh,” Gwen said. “You don’t sound French.”

“Mary-Anne” shrugged. “I’m good at languages.”

David wondered if pretending to be blood-family was the best idea. He knew from both experience and Haunt’s loud explanations that white folks could get uptight about families with more than one shade to them. On the other hand, he had no clue how this ruse was working, if it even was. 

“So,” said Liam, “wanna play Marco Polo or something?”

Unsurprisingly, Allison dominated at every game that couldn’t be decided by pure size. They played with the McNallys for nearly three hours, until the afternoon sky began to dull and their parents called them out of the water.

“Bye, David!” Gwen called as she followed her brother back onto the shore. “It was nice meeting you!” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “You too, Mary-Anne!”

“You two are lucky,” remarked Liam. “Your folks letting you swim so late.”

Knots formed in Allison and David’s stomachs.

As soon as the human children were out of sight, David hugged Allison. “Glad you’re awake,” he whispered into her ear, before he pulled away from her a step. “Now, can you tell me what the heck just happened?”

Allison took a deep breath and started wading back onto dry land. It felt wrong to talk so serious in the water. David followed without comment, feet stained to their ankles with lake mud.

“So, why didn’t those kids recognise you?”

Allison smiled. That at least was easy to answer. “Because they thought I looked like this.”

Where Allison stood, David only saw a tan, blonde girl with her old hazel eyes.

“Okay…And how are you doing that?”

The stranger shuffled her feet. “Alberto got shot by one of the boss soldiers. I didn’t want his song to go away so I… did something and now it’s inside me. Forever, I think.”

David didn’t respond to that at first. It was a bit to take in. For a few seconds, he just gazed at her, before eventually settling on:

“What?”

“I saved his song. Put it in mine. So now I can do all that psychic stuff he used to.” She looked down at the thin grass. “He could do a lot more than he said he could.”

David cocked his head at that. He didn’t like it when people picked on Alberto. But this was Allie… and there were more important questions anyways.

“So… where is he?”

“Gone. Or—not gone, but not walking around.” She rubbed her head. “I know everything he did. Not just like, facts and stuff. I can remember his mum’s face…”

The taste of old, sour wine in the back of her mouth. Soft, pale flesh in the dark…

She grimaced. “…Other stuff, too.”

For a few seconds, David contemplated giving her a hug. She didn’t sound upset. But what she was saying was…

“You okay?”

Allison considered it. “Yeah. I think I am. I’m better now. I don’t have to copy people not to be weak anymore.”

“Yeah,” he said, his tone slightly dubious. “Um. About that. So, are those eyes a forever thing now? Cuz you kinda stand out, you know?”

Mary-Ann dissolved. Allison kept forgetting her eyes. It wasn’t hard to. They didn’t feel any different. “I think they might be. But they’re not all bad.”

Allison was wreathed in fire, her skin lit lapis violet like the very heart of a flame. Globules of lava bubbled into being in her hands, which she smeared across the air in front of her like she was finger painting with light. The heat of it hit David like a bonfire’s shout.

“I can do this now! I think the Flying Man made it happen! Guess I can thank him for something…”

“…Okay,” David began, trying to think of the most tactful way to say this. “But can you ever, you know, not look like a superhero now? I kinda like getting to play with other kids, you know? Without people noticing what we are?” He thought for a moment. “Could you, I dunno, cover it up with my eyes, maybe?”

Allison frowned. “I don’t look like a superhero,” she said, sounding surprisingly hurt. “My eyes just glow a bit. But I’ll try.” 

The fire went out, the magma cooling until it was nothing. The girl screwed her eyes shut, taking in David’s whale bone whistles and glass flutes. When she opened them again, her eyes were green. “Did it work?”

“Yup!” David grinned. “You look like Allie again!”

She giggled. “No, I look like you! Allie has cool glowing eyes. And yours aren’t super-normal either.”

“At least I can turn the glowey off,” he replied playfully, raising a hand and waggling a finger up and down like he was playing with a lightswitch, his eyes lighting and dimming rapidly in time with the movement.

Allison laughed loudly, before remembering what she had come to tell him. She sat down, facing out towards the water and the white gravel hill of the dam wall. “David, bad stuff happened back at the school. I think… those soldiers killed our friends. All of them. All at onc-”

The last word never made it out her throat, cut off by the loud snapping sound ringing out from the dam. David hadn’t moved, but now that she was looking, she saw that the water behind them was suddenly very still.

“I know, Allie”, he said, his voice small. “I know. I felt the bullets go through them.” Far off in the distance, the dam’s short, squat intake tower let out another loud snapping noise, before the strut supporting it gave out, and it crumbled below the surface. 

“… What do you wanna do about it?”

Allison clenched her fists. The fire came back to her eyes. “I want to hurt them. They hurt us, we hurt them back. Bad.”

Allison had been expecting this to be a fight; that she might have to bully past David’s constitutional niceness to get at what she wanted. She’d been wrong.

“Yeah,” he said. “I wanna hurt them too.”

Allison blinked. “You do? Really hurt them? Kill them?”

“What did they do to my mum, Allie?” he asked. “Why can’t I feel her anymore?”

It barely sounded like a question.

The images clawed their way to the front of Allison’s mind. That ruined face, blood turning to water. She shook slightly. 

David watched the memory hit her, and gave her a small smile.

“Yeah. I wanna kill them.”

Allison looked long and hard at her friend. Slowly, she asked, “Davie, are you alright?”

David shrugged. “I’m angry, if that’s what you’re asking.” His smile grew a fraction wider. “And there’s a little voice in my head telling me not to hurt them. Buuut it sounds a lot like Lawrence.” 

He sat down beside Allison, putting a hand on her leg. “They killed my mummy. They killed our family. We’re gonna make them hurt and hurt till they wish they were dead.” He stretched out. “But there’s still so much good. We’re together. We’re free.” He closed his eyes. “And there’s so much water.”

Allison looked at David’s lights. She could see rage. Sadness. As white and hot as the sun. But there was joy too, blue and cool. They coiled like mating serpents; entwined, creating, but seperate. His song was much the same: what should have been cacophony and discordance harmonising, like a hot jazz band playing with a string quartet.

She envied him. 

She noticed something else, too. That was part of it, the rage, the emotion. But there was something else inside there too. Something old. She searched Alberto’s memory for it, and came up empty handed. The one in Fran’s mind had fallen quiet years ago.

“Allie,” David reached over, and gave her hand a little squeeze. “I want you out of my head now, please.”

With that, the thing inside his mind gave her a push, and she couldn’t feel him anymore. All there was was the face of the deep. 

Something else inside David had died, Allison realised. A tapeworm of personhood. Some might have called it a soul. It had been a long, slow death, but it was finally done. 

“It’s going to be okay, Allie.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. We’re going to crush and burn and drown them all alive. Tim Valour’s going to scream till he’s coughing up blood. Then we’re gonna to swim and play chasey and eat chocolate till we spew.” The boy stood up, helping Allison to her feet. “Come on,” he said. “You need to tell the others.”

⬖

As soon as they returned to the copse, Allison had started bossing a camp into existence. Arnold had teleported some tents their way, kindly pre-assembled by the campers who owned them, along with a healthy collection of ice-boxes and picnic hampers. 

They were nearly having fun, until Allison got the fire going and started explaining:

“So… Alberto brainwashed us?”

Allison looked at Arnold. The boy’s tone was shocked, but tainted with hope. She’d just got done explaining what Lawrence had had him teleport all around Australia and beyond. The boy’s face was still pale.

“Yeah,” she answered. “Not every second of every day, but enough that we usually did what Lawrence wanted us to.”

“Did he make me…” Arnold didn’t finish the question. He didn’t need to.

Allison bit her lip. “No, Alberto didn’t want that to happen.”

Arnold curled in on himself. “Oh.”

A furred, clawed hand patted him on the back. “It wasn’t your fault,” said Billy softly. “You didn’t know what the eggs were.”

Arnold moaned, tears glinting on his cheeks in the firelight. “Why did I even send them where he said to start with? He wouldn’t have known…”

“He said he was gonna dob on your baby niece,” said David. “I don’t think I’d have risked it if I were you.”

Arnold glanced at the water-sprite out the corner of his eye. If I were you…

Mabel was standing with her back to the fire, her hands balled at her sides. “So it was all just Alberto and Lawrence playing a game with us?”

Allison dug at the dirt with her heel. “At first, I guess? They kinda stopped working together near the end.”

David leaned forward. An awful thought had occurred to him. “Was taking over the Institute Alberto’s idea?”

“No,” Allison answered very firmly. “That was all us.”

“Are you sure?” David asked. It was the least certain Allison had heard him sound in weeks.

“Sure for sure. Eliza had put him to sleep when it happened, remember?” An unwelcome stab of memory cut at Allison, making her physically wince. She blurted, “She killed Adam. He was turning off our powers so Lawrence made her kill him.”

Billy went to speak. First to ask Allie what she had meant to say. Then to tell her that she was wrong. Then to shout she was lying. When he finally opened his mouth, all that came out were choked sobs, breaking out into a long wail. 

David’s shoulders tensed. He turned his head up at the stars peeking through the branches above, trying not to look at anyone else. Deep in the waters that were his mind, the white serpent stirred.

Arnold and Mabel meanwhile, just looked at each other. What should’ve been an explosion had passed through them like a whisper. Mabel turned to Allison. “…Why are we not surprised?”

It should’ve been sarcasm. It wasn’t.

Allison took a deep breath. “You both worked it out ages back. Alberto made you forget.” Her gaze briefly flickered towards David. He didn’t notice. “He—we can do that.”

Silence. The only comment came from the crickets and the nightbirds. 

Mabel strode over to Allison, pulling her gently but firmly off the log she’d been sitting on. “You gotta promise never to mess with our brains like that, kay?” She beckoned the others to stand. “Promise all of us. Unless we’re all gonna die if you don’t do it, you’ll never make us do things or forget things we don’t want to.”

Allison nodded vigorously. “Never.”

The children all spat in their hands and put them together. It was the most sacred covenant available to them. It sealed Allison’s promise, and a thousand other unspoken trusts. Above all else, to stay together.

“What do we do now?” Billy asked, still sniffling. 

Allison thought about it. “Whatever we want.”

Luckily, Mabel had an actual suggestion. “In that case… How does that lava thing work?

1. In the years following the conclusion of the Cuban Crisis, Ayn Rand would write exhaustively on the subject of superheroes. These later writings alienated some followers, who accused the author and philosopher of abandoning the principles of Objectivism in favour of a kind of superpower backed feudalism. Detractors saw no difference. Rand would even briefly return to fiction in 1964, penning the novel Hercules’ Wake, a self-admittedly allegory for the then stalled Vietnam Conflict centred around superheroes rising up against the government. Years after her death from heart failure in 1984, several attempts at poetry by Rand were discovered dedicated to a superhero commonly believed to either be Joe Allworth or the New York superhero Green Sentinel. One commentator went on the record calling it, “Better than the stuff about William Hickman.” ↩

Previous Chapter                                                                                                           Next Chapter

Chapter Fifty-Five: …And Hell Rode Behind Her

Book Two: Titanomachy

Allison Kinsey ran through the bush, bounding over branches and rocks with no conscious effort. Her muscles screamed under her skin until she silenced them. She would have played Cardea’s, or Jumpcut’s, or even Britomart’s songs, but all she could find of them was echoes in the air.

Windshear’s song had stopped first. Then Linus’ had reared to life, clear and glorious, before going jagged and ending mid-note.

Ending. How could a song end?    

The Institute’s children had all vanished—extinguished in an impossible explosion of music—leaving only the Watercolours and nearly a hundred strange, banal human songs.

And, of course, its prodigal son.

Alberto and Allison collided with no small force, both falling backwards into the undergrowth.

“Ow, fucking ow…”

Allison recovered first, springing catlike back her feet and looking down with bewilderment at the esper in soldier’s costume sprawled before her. “Alberto? What—I thought—why are you dressed like that?”

Alberto lunged at the little girl, slapping a gloved hand over her mouth. “Shut up, shut up! They’ll hear you!”

Allison backed away from the man, out of his grip. “Those soldiers?” She scowled at Alberto’s uniform. “Are you with them?”

A gasp of pure frustration throttled its way out of Alberto. “No! I mean, yes, but—” A choked noise that might have been a sob. “It wasn’t supposed to go this way.”

Allison realised there were tear-streaks on the man’s face. Quietly, she asked, “Alberto, what’s happening?”

“Valour sent his bloody people after you. Cormey went nuts, and they started shooting! Christ, Mary and Windy are dead!” Alberto’s eyes darted around like he thought there were demons in the trees. “How—where’d they go? Oh, God, I think they’re all dead.”  

Allison just stood there.

Dead.

She couldn’t get a hold on the idea. She knew what death was supposed to mean. How could she not? Sometimes it seemed to be all grown ups thought and wrote about. But those were only words. She’d never known anyone who died. Even Adam had been a brief passerby in her life, exiting quietly out of her sight.  

But then, hadn’t that just happened to all the other students?

Everyone was dead. People Allison had played with everyday for nearly a year were gone, their songs silenced forever.

Bella was barely seven. Mrs Gillespie had put flowers in Allison’s hair and held her when she cried. They’d both been shot.

Allison’s nails dug into the skin of her palms, radioactive-green light coursing through her from head to toe. “I’m gonna kill them.”

“What?”

“I’m going to kill them all!”

Alberto stared at the little girl. There was no fear in her, only pure, untempered fury. A child’s anger, a hard gem of flame that burned away everything else.

The only other supers within Allison’s grasp were the other theatre kids. Could she take on over a hundred armed men with just those powers? Normally, Alberto wouldn’t have hesitated saying “Yes!” and running far, far away, but somehow those soldiers had put out dozens of their lot, all at once.

He didn’t want to feel another child die.

“No.”

The child burned brighter. “No?”

“They just managed to rub out two footy teams worth of you! At once. I don’t know if the Physician packed them a fucking tactical nuke or what, but you can’t fight that!”

“They killed my friends! Don’t you care?”

Alberto was surprised to find he did. “They’ll kill you too, if you don’t turn around and run.”

Allison marched past the psychic. “You can’t stop me.”

Alberto had never thought much of himself. Truthfully, he was right not to. But couldn’t he stop this stupid little girl from wandering into her death?

He slipped off his gloves. “No, I guess I can’t.”

He swung around and grabbed Allison’s shoulder. “You are going to turn around, go get your friends, and run far, far away, you hear me, kid?”

For a single moment, something inside her resisted.

“… Right.”

It was as she turned to leave, orienting towards the still ringing sound of Arnold and Mabel’s songs in the distance, that she heard a quiet pop in the distance, and Alberto staggered as something struck him in the arm. “Fuck!”

Allison stopped walking, and turned to stare at Alberto. He was on the ground, cradling a  bleeding shoulder with his remaining good hand. His song was fluctuating. Spiking. What if it went away, too? Like all the others had.

She couldn’t let that happen.

She didn’t really think about what happened next. It was like reflexively reaching for an apple when you dropped it. The next thing Allison knew, she was upon the psychic, her knees pressing against his chest and pinning him there as, for the first time, she dug her power into him, pulling his song into her own.

“Oh, Christ,” he whimpered, the pain apparently forgotten. “Not like this, you little cunt.” She felt his hand against her forehead, trailing fresh blood across her scalp. “Sleep!” he commanded. “Fucking sleep, Allison!”

Why was she so tired all of a sudden? Allison ignored it. No time for that. She had to help Alberto.

“Stop fighting me.”

Alberto had been halfway through a yell when his voice cut off, his hand, halfway through trying to shove the girl away, fell back. He stopped.

“A—Allison,” he begged, a few fresh tears trickling down his face. “Please don’t. I don’t want to die like this.”

Die? Allison paused for a moment, confused. Why die? She was saving him.

“It’s gonna be okay,” she whispered, not sure how she knew that. “You’ll be fine. I promise.” For a moment, Alberto tried to object, but then she pressed his power into him, and that look of panic seemed to catch on something.

“… You promise?”

She gave him another reassuring wave of his power, and nodded.

“I’m gonna get us out of here.”

Alberto closed his eyes.

“… Okay.”

A dozen or so seconds later, Allison stood back up. Then, she turned on her heel, and set off, leaving the thing that had once been Tiresias bleeding from every hole in his face. His song was nothing but noise now, but that was okay. It was still playing inside Allison.

She felt good. The anger was still there, but even that felt good. Like a thousand birthdays.

There was a soldier in her path. An old man, with a still-smoking pistol hanging limply at his side like a child’s toy.

“Good God, girl, what did you do to Moretti?”

Allison kept walking, her head tilted. There were lights inside the man’s head: fireflies dancing in his skull. And they told her things, like Morse code. His name was Harris Yellick, and he had done very bad things.

“Why’d you kill them?”

Allison knew Yellick was going to shoot at her before he even raised his gun. The lights screamed it, but that wasn’t the only tell. It was like he had to do everything twice before it happened.

She dodged the bullet like it was a tennis ball.

“Fuck.”

Electric riffs.

Allison roared with Billy’s voice, toppling the major like a blade of grass in a hurricane. In a split second she had a foot on his throat.

“You killed Mels.” She didn’t know why she’d used that name.

“I didn’t…”

“You made someone do it.”

Allison was wondering what she was going to do with the man when she heard the song.

It rose and ebbed in a tide of flame over her. Its notes and harmonies couldn’t be counted, reaching higher than the uppermost reaches of the night, where stars lived and died. It was the voice of comet and asteroid. It was the growth of flowers, the white-gold of dawn, and the foam-wrought sea all at once.

It was everything.

Allison started to babble words born under different constellations. She knew the webs of birth and death, the pathways between ancient suns, and the very language that wrote the universe. In that moment, she could’ve reconciled quantum physics, gravity, and magic in a single sentence.

It was too much. She couldn’t take it all in.

It did help fill in some gaps, though.

Allison could remember snippets of songs. David’s, Veltha’s, Snapdragon’s, even Windshear’s. Beautiful, but powerless. Incomplete.

But then, she’d already worked Alberto’s song into her pattern, hadn’t she?

Allison burst into flames. It was ecstasy.

Major Yellick thrashed and struggled, staring up at the ashen-skinned spirit.

She looked down at him with yellow, burning eyes. “You hurt my family.”

“…I’m sorry.”

Allison didn’t answer him. Not with words. A globule of magma bubbled into existence in her hand.

“Wait, please!”

The conjured liquid rock coiled and spiraled down through the air like a river of sunlight. Major Yellick’s flesh burned. His bones blackened. His blood turned to steam in his veins. His screams were lost in that boundless song.

Allison stepped back from the smouldering body. His song was gone now. Good. She looked up through the trees, towards the source of the new music. She’d always been able to hear songs. But now she could see them.

It was thousands upon thousands of layers of mystic violet and nearly white lavender, with countless stars pressed between them like specks of gold in stained glass. They came together like rose petals.

And at the centre of it all, the Flying Man hovered above the Institute.

“Allie?”

Arnold’s voice.

“What’s going on?”

Allison turned to look at her friend. The others were standing a little behind the boy, holding onto each other.

“What the hell is that?” Mabel said, pointing at what was left of Major Yellick.

“It’s nothing,” answered Allison, meaning it.

“Something wrong with Alberto,” Billy said. “He’s all… bleeding.”

“He’ll be alright.”  

Billy, Mabel, and David all disappeared in a blast of lightning. Allison’s new fire had been replaced by Arnold’s electricity.

“Allie! What are you doing?”

“I had to put them somewhere safe. The Flying Man’s here.”

“…The Flying Man?”

“We need to leave.”

“How?” Arnold’s voice was very small.

“Your power.”

“But one of us will get left behind!”

Arnold’s aura grew brighter in Allison. She held out her hand. “Not if we zap each other at the same time.”

Slowly, Arnold started glowing, too. He reached for Allison. “You sure this’ll work?”

“Promise.”

“The Dam?”

“Yeah. The Dam.”

The two children’s hands touched—  

Previous Chapter                                                                                                           Next Chapter

Chapter Fifty-Four: These Are the Damned

Book Two: Titanomachy

The army convoy slowly crept down the moonlit Great Eastern Highway, as though wary of attracting the gaze of the stars above. An American-donated humvee led a coterie of armoured troop-carriers down the pitch black road: a bee marshalling a parade of wasps. In their wake, four trucks dragged spired chambers carved from what looked like rough volcanic rock. “Quiet Vans,” their inventor called them. The road was so narrow, the entire procession could only drive in single file.

Someone had wanted to bring a tank, but the powers that be decided that would fall in the odd overlap between far-too-much and not-nearly-enough.

Alberto was pretty sure it had been an American.

The psychic rode in one of the cramped transports, reeking of sweat and sandwiched shoulder-to-shoulder between two soldiers on a hard metal bench, their gun-barrels crossed in front of his chest. The cabin was filled with more shadow than light, yet glaringly bright to Alberto’s eyes. Swirls of hot yellow fear, nebulas of blue curiosity, even a shameful cloud of excitement. Alberto wasn’t surprised to find that some of the boys were looking forward to testing their mettle against real supers. At least some of them were rightly scared shitless. And then there were the smart ones. The ones who knew that—whatever happened at the New Human Institute—none of them would be getting into Heaven that night.

“Feels weird, fighting kids,” one of the soldiers mused. He was an American (a very southern American, by the sound of him) whose broad features stood out in the gloom like Mount Rushmore at night. DOPO had insisted on there being an American presence on the raid. They had lost people too, the US consulate insisted, and they would have their pound of flesh.

Alright, the last part was mostly inference on Alberto’s part. Even so, he supposed the DDHA was in no position to turn down the help. After the bombings, the Australian government mostly consisted of Timothy Valour and Harold Holt1. For now, they were about as independent as the average banana republic.

“You aren’t fighting kids yet,” Alberto reminded him. With surprising vehemence, he added, “And if you have any sense, better hope you keep not fighting them.”

One of the Australian soldiers replied, “Can you really even call them kids? When they’re that strong…”

“Even gods have childhoods, Private Warren.”

Every other head in the transport snapped to look at the one woman among them. Alberto had been issued an ADF uniform for the mission, but Strikepoint looked like she had wandered in from the movie playing in the next theatre. She wore a black domino mask, with a charcoal grey body-glove broken up by cobwebs of glow-paint lightning. Her chest bore a pair of scales weighing a white feather. A swan’s, she had mentioned to Alberto back at base. Her hands meanwhile had been left bare, by specific request, apparently.

Alberto was almost certain she had been sourced from the asylums. She had the same buzz cut Allison had when he first met her.

Damn it, why did he let himself think about Allison? About any of them?

“Know that for a fact, do you?” Private Warren asked, a forced smile to his voice.

Strikepoint simply answered, “I did.”

The cabin went quiet again.

Fuck, Alberto thought to himself. Since when did superheroes have such big egos?

But was it ego? Alberto’s powers offered no answers. Trying to read Strikepoint’s mind was like attempting to parse constellations at the centre of the galaxy. It was as if her whole body was made of latticed thought.

Is she some sort of projection?

“Hey, Psi-Man.”

Alberto winced as he turned towards the American. “Yes, Wilkins?”

“Psi-Man” was his code name for the operation. It was almost as bad as “Tiresias” but at least nobody expected him to use it on his own time. He’d put his foot down at the costume, though. The DDHA had wanted him to do this in a high-collared cape and the turban. Apparently, he and Strikepoint were meant to represent “a new, more socially responsible tradition of superheroism.”

Fucking jackals.

“Sergeant says you can see the future? That true?”

“Some of them.”

“…How many?”

“Trillions. At least.”

Wilkins thought he was making the word up.

“He’s right,” Strikepoint interjected. “Some dooms are fixed, but the rest of it…” She waved her hand. Her fingernails cut faint trails in the black. “People—societies—they always want something outside themselves to blame.”

One of the Australians whispered, “Blimey.”

On that note, the carrier came to a halt. Alberto half-expected the darkness to slosh about like water inside an aquarium. Instead the doors opened, diluting the shadow.

Alberto stood up as straight as he could without scraping the roof. “Well, time to pick our doom.”

Soldiers bustled about the road, setting up road blockades or assembling before their commanding officers. Some, Alberto knew, were armed with Physician-made tranquillisers, along with high-impact and explosive rounds.    

Others just had plain old bullets.

It didn’t take long for the major to find the two superhumans. He was a short, stockily built older man, with brown hair graying at the temples like wood ash and a pencil mustache. Something about his air reminded Alberto of Arnold Barnes’ father. Only taller.

He shook Strikepoint’s hand. “Good to see you, Miss… Strikepoint. I’m Major Yellick. Valour’s put me in charge of this show.”

Strikepoint nodded. “He told me about you. Said you served together in the war.”

Major Yellick allowed himself a small smile. “Yes. If the camera had been aimed a little differently, I might be the one on all the comic covers.”

Alberto raised an eyebrow. “Think a lot of yourself, do we?”

Major Yellick almost slapped the weedy looking wog around the ear for insubordination, but then he spotted the red “SS” badge on his breast2. “You’re Psi-Man, I take it?” He did not offer Alberto his hand. Tim had been very clear on that.

“If you must.”

Tim had also told him to expect lip. If anything, he should be worried if none was forthcoming. He returned it in-kind. “Yes, Psi-Man. I must.”

“Can we just get this over with?”

“Glad to see we’re on the same page about this.” Yerrick’s gaze drifted downward. He cleared his throat. “Are the targets asleep?”

“They’re not targets,” said Strikepoint firmly. “Not like that. I’m just here for deterrence.”

“Ah, my apologies… but are they?”

Alberto closed his eyes, casting his third eye towards the Institute. Dozens of low, dreamy clusters of light, mostly concentrated in the dorms. A few bright stragglers and scattered sleepers, but Alberto had been expecting that.

“About as close to all of them as we can hope for.”

“…Priority Alpha?”

Alberto sighed. “Her too.”

“Right then.” Major Yerrick took his walkie-talkie off his belt. “Positions, everyone. Operation: Prometheus commences in minus ten minutes.”

The bulk of the seventy-five strong task force broke up into ten squads of five and crept like wolves into the trees bordering the west side of the highway. The remaining twenty-five men phalanxed around Strikepoint and Alberto, Major Yerrick taking spearpoint.

They marched to a dirt turnoff into the bush. It had no signpost—just as the property owner liked it. As the squad started down the path, under the shadow of bent, curious trees, Alberto started thinking one thought very hard:

DON’T PAY US ATTENTION! DON’T PAY US ATTENTION!

It was a simple enough trick. He used to pull it all the time playing hide and seek with Françoise.3

Fran.       

He’d never done it with so many hangers-on, though. The pressure in his ears felt like he was in a plane taking off from the bottom of the sea.

“You’re really making us invisible, esper?” Strikepoint asked.

Alberto screwed his eyes shut before blinking rapidly. “Not exactly. You ever notice the air in front of your face?”

“I might be the wrong person to answer that.”

“Then please stop talking.”

Strikepoint’s usual edifice of sage reserve cracked. “Oh sorry.”

Alberto put his fingers to his forehead. That usually told idiots he was doing psychic stuff—even when he wasn’t.

He’d never realised how long the path to the Institute was, or how fast you could reach the end by foot. He threw a hand up before the squad turned the last bend, along with a general vibe of “hold up.”

Yerrick glanced over his shoulder at Alberto. The psychic nodded back.

The major steeled himself. “Wilkins, you’re up.”

The soldiers parted to let the American make his way to the front.

He saluted the major. “Awaiting orders, sir!”

Yerrick regarded the private. He was so young. Couldn’t be more than twenty-two. He still had freckles. Who thought giving this job to someone with freckles was a good idea? Had he done well on an infiltration course4? He put a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Private, you’re going to hear a voice in your head. That’s just Psi-Man, you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Make sure you follow his instructions exactly as he gives them.” Yerrick felt like he was handing over his kid to a babysitter. “If you argue or try to resist, you might break his concentration.”

And then the super-children murder us all.

Both men winced.

“What he said.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Remember, son, you’re not just doing this for your country, you’re doing it for mine, and every other country where human beings make their homes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you pull this off, you might be well be saving the lives of every child at this school.”

Wilkins didn’t know why the major was trying to hammer it in so hard. He was a soldier. This was his job. “Yes, sir!”

“Good luck, soldier.”

The private trode on ahead, turning the corner and emerging onto the New Human Institute, before hopping the fence and wading out into the night-covered grass. Looking around at the silhouetted buildings and other, less definable shapes in the distance, Wilkins’ mind rapidly flicked between his family’s farm back in New England, and the forgotten, degenerate towns that dotted Lovecraft’s vision of the East Coast.       

Priority Alpha is in the farmhouse, get a move on.

Private Wilkins obeyed, climbing the slope towards the looming manor.

Voices. Children.

The soldier swung around, the light on his rifle shining on a blonde teenage girl with a younger boy heading right for him.

“Shit. Shit. Shit.”

Stay still!   

Private Wilkins did just that, not that he had much of a choice in the matter. Fear nailed his feet to the earth.

“…So he said ‘Well, maybe when it comes Allie can be the midwife.’ He seriously thought I was going to let a nine year old be my midwife!”

“Idiot.”

The pair passed by Wilkins without comment. Once he was sure they were out of earshot, he whispered, “How…”

I made you less interesting than the dirt you’re standing on. Trust me, it wasn’t hard. Now get on with it!

Private Wilkins soon reached the farmhouse. The front door wasn’t locked. Why would it be?

Inside, the only sources of light were a few strategically placed candles. Wilkins didn’t need them. He found himself navigating the darkened, rambling house like it was his own. He even turned his scope-light off. Why make Psi-Man’s job harder for him? Directions came not as words, but pure impulse.

He climbed the stairs to the top floor, and opened the second door on the right:

She was asleep, thank God, lying under a thin white duvet.

Through Private Wilkins’ eyes, Alberto watched Françoise Barthe’s chest rise and fall.

He’d tried arguing for her, he really had.

“For God’s sake, Valour! She could win Vietnam for you!”

Timothy Valour had turned his back to Alberto while he stared out the window of his new office. “She’s also unstable and aggressive. There’s no way she’ll go along with the removal.”

“I could—”

“I know you could. Ethics aside, what happens if you let the reigns slip?”

“I wouldn’t—”

“We drown, that’s what happens.”

“…Can you blame her?”

“I offered her a sensible, humane alternative. I offered them all that. They didn’t listen.”

Private Wilkins lowered his rifle and raised his sidearm, cocking back the pistol’s hammer as he stalked closer to the Priority’s bedside.

It needs to be a headshot, right through the brain. If she even gets a second to use her powers, you will die. We will all die.

Wilkins aimed his gun just above the woman’s ear, the end almost getting tangled in the gold of her hair. His fingers wrapped around the trigger—  

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They’d told him this woman was a fearsome, mighty sea-witch, more a goddess than a super. But now she just looked like a woman…

She’s more dangerous than any hero or villain you’ve heard of. She could fight the Flying and win. Easily. You have to—

The woman stirred. Her blue, gleaming eyes locked with Wilkins’ own. “What—”   

Fuck!

Wilkins’ finger twitched. Alberto heard the bang.

The private watched as the body collapsed into water, soaking into the mattress and spilling down the sides. Soon, all that was left of Françoise Barthe was the blood on Wilkins’ face.

“Psi-Man,” he said aloud, like he was speaking to God. “She—are you seeing this?”

Yes, Wilkins.

“Is—is she dead?”

Alberto closed his eyes. Françoise’s lights were gone. “Yes Wilkins, you did it. You fucking did it.”

The psychic felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Strikepoint’s. “Moretti, are you alright?”

Alberto brushed it off. He could find no traction on the woman’s mind, but right now he couldn’t bring himself to care. “I just helped assassinate my oldest friend. No, I’m not.” He looked over at Major Yellick. “Tell the men to start the roundup. I don’t want to be anywhere near this shithole by sunup.”

⬗

The Watercolours were panicking. It was the only sensible thing to do.

“What the hell is going on?” Arnold cried. “Why’d Mavis… do that?”

Mabel got in Allison’s face and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Did you say there was shooting?”

“That’s what it sounded like!”

Billy was tearily repeating, “Not a good game—not a good game—not a good game…”   

In the middle of it all, David stamped his foot and shouted with as much of mother in his voice as he could muster, “Everyone shut up!”

The others fell silent.

David raised a hand. His eyes were burning. “People are coming.”

In the distance, torchlights cut through the trees like phantom axes.

By the time the vanguard of the gamma squad reached the Watercolours, the four children were sitting around a renewed campfire, each with a hand of playing cards.

The squad-leader’s scope-light fell on David’s back while he shuffled the deck. The soldier called out to his comrades, “Y’all get your asses up here, I’ve found them!”

The Watercolours didn’t look up from their cards, listening impassively as the heavy-booted footsteps amassed around them.

“Alright kids, it’s over.”  

 “Go fish,” Billy said.

“We’re playing poker, Growly,” said Mabel.

“Oh.”

The squad-leader and his gathered troops exchanged confused glances. Did these kids even realize they were there? Did they care?

“…Look, we’re not here to hurt you!”

“We know,” said Arnold.

A storm of green lightning struck the meadow,  illuminating it like green sunrise, but one gone as fast as it started. Arnold’s empty pool came alive with shouting and wild, chittering gunfire.

Allison dropped down from the trees above the patch of grass where the soldiers had been standing, now luna-barren. She tried shouting over the bullets still screeching up from the crater, “What were they doing?”

Mabel put her hand to her ear, “What?”

“I said, ‘What were they doing?’ ”

“I can’t hear you!”

Allison pointed her fingers over her shoulders. A dozen or so trees behind the girl suddenly found themselves uprooted above the crater. The soldiers screamed as they rained down upon them. The gunfire stopped.

“They dead?” Allison asked flatly, already knowing the answer.

Billy carefully approached the groaning pit, poking his head over the rim just enough to be able to peer at the mess of broken trunks, branches, and khaki-clothed limbs. “Are you fellas okay down there?”

The human bush swore almost as one entity.

Billy frowned. “Don’t be rude! You pointed guns at us!”

One of the buried soldiers gasped out, “Fuck off, Paddington Bear.”

“That doesn’t even make sense!”

Mabel joined Billy at the edge, along with the red-suited spacewoman. The astronaut pointed her raygun down at the soldiers. “Please tell the children why you’re here, fellow travellers.”

“We’re getting you freaks back. For what you did to Canberra!”

Arnold looked at David. “Wait, are they talking about you and Allie’s show?”

The water-sprite shrugged. “I thought we were pretty—”

A wave of perfect, unnatural silence washed over the clearing, drowning David’s words the moment they passed his lips.

Arnold tried to ask what was going on, but it was like he was trapped in a muted TV set. He couldn’t even hear his own thoughts. For a brief, horrible moment, Allison couldn’t hear any songs.

A second later, sound rushed back into the world.

“What was that?” asked Mabel.

Something fast and bright flitted past the girl.

“Or that!”

“I don’t know,” answered Allison. She tilted her ear, trying to regain her hold on the Institute’s musical landscape. “Something’s—”

She took off running, back towards the Institute.

Arnold tried to run after her. “Allie! Wait up!”

The boy couldn’t hope to keep up with his friend’s inhuman speed and grace. Not after what she had heard.

“Allie!”

⬖

It could be debated whether soldiers are very bad or in fact rather good at getting children out of bed. Alberto and Major Yellick’s men scoured the dormitories, their screamed orders jarring the students out of their dreams, while rough hands and rifle-butts forced them drowsy and bewildered out into the night.

The soldiers started to shepherd the crying, confused children towards the Institute’s wood and wire gate. Lana was being frog-marched by a pair of Americans in some twisted gesture of chivalry when she caught sight of Alberto:

“Bertie! What the hell are you doing here?” She squinted at his uniform. “When’d you join the army?”

Alberto shouted back, “Just keep doing what they tell you. It’ll be alright as long as you don’t fight!”

Louise and Tom each had an arm around Bella, trying to support the sobbing younger girl and keep up with the other children, ahead of the soldiers’ gunpoints.

“Why are they doing this to us?” Louse whispered.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tom answered. “They don’t need a reason.”

Louise hoped Bella didn’t hear him.

Strikepoint watched it all from the farmhouse verandah, her hand scorching the balustrade where she grasped it. Her thoughts were of a night thousands of sunrises gone—of children being led from a burning city towards the living death of slavery and worse.

It has to be better than that. Valour swore to me.

The newly minted superheroine searched the faces of the children below. Was Allison Kinsey among them? She wondered if Dr. Carter would think well of her “help.”

Something caught her eye. A gaggle of soldiers shouting at a pearly, iridescent dome and hammering their rifles against it.

This looked like a job for Strikepoint.

One of the soldiers, an Australian with an unfortunately patchy beard, bellowed, “You’re only making things worse yourselves!” He nodded at one of his fellows. “Do it.”

The other army man turned his gun the right way around and fired at the dome. It expanded explosively, knocking the troops closest to the ground and throwing up a crest of sod.

“What’s going on here?”

The soldiers all scrambled to attention (and their feet) seemingly racing to see who could salute Strikepoint first. She folded her arms and tried to smile wryly. “You do realize I’m not your CO, right boys?”

The badly shaved Aussie’s shoulders dropped slightly. “Yeah, but you know… superhero.”

It was funny, the instinctive respect a dollop of spirit-gum and a strip of fabric across the bridge of her nose could afford. It reminded Strikepoint of the masks the priests once wore. “Suit yourselves.” She pointed past the men at the bubble. “Still looks like you could use some help.”

The lead soldier’s face hardened. “There’s a couple demis hiding under there. They’re refusing to drop… whatever that thing is.”

So they got to be demis, while she was a superhero. Odd. “Of course they aren’t, you’re waving guns at them. Move aside.”

They obeyed. Wise. Strikepoint knelt in front of the shining bubble. She could see the shadows of two children huddling at the centre of it. It had been nearly two hundred years since she’d mothered any child, but she tried her best to remember. “Listen, I don’t blame you for doing this. I know we’re being scary, and you don’t deserve this.”

One of the soldiers tried to object, but Strikepoint threw her hand up, sunlight blazing beneath her palm. He shut up.

“Things will get better. I promise.”       

The dome dessicated and faded away, revealing a grimy little girl and a boy with sand-blond hair. Strikepoint wanted to ask which of them created the force-field. She didn’t.

The girl said, “You really promise?”

Strikepoint smiled gently. “On the River Styx.” She took the pair by the hands, helping them up from the ground. She was doubly glad she’d turned down gloves. “That’s deadly serious.”

They started walking towards what Strikepoint couldn’t help but think as the chokepoint.

“Are you a superhero?” asked the boy.

“Yes.”

Strikepoint felt the children’s hands relax slightly in hers.

It was a strange mask she wore.

⬖

Alberto was leaning against the fence when the soldiers dragged over what was left of the NHI’s staff like a cut-rate Roman triumph.

“We found them in the cottages.”

Bryant Cormey struggled against a pair of handcuffs. He spat at Alberto, “Traitor!”

Alberto ignored the teacher. He was going straight for Vercingetorix. He pushed aside past the soldiers that were flanking the headmaster and grabbed Lawrence by the front of his mouldering suit-jacket. “I fucking knew it.”

Lawrence’s voice was low, almost a whimper. “I tried, Tiresias.”

Mary was weeping into her nightgown. The soldiers at her side looked like they wanted to offer her a handkerchief. “Why are you doing this, Alberto?”

Alberto shared a look with the old woman, regret passing briefly over his features. “I’m sorry, Mrs G.” He glared back at Lawrence. “You’ll have to ask him.” Alberto turned around and walked away from the teachers, telling the soldiers, “Put them with the kids. I’m sure Tim will figure out what to do with them. Once he’s done buying me a fucking drink.”

The teachers were taken to the gate, where their students stood huddled before Major Yerrick and his praetorians, guns aimed at them from all sides.

Strikepoint fed the former Abalone and Veltha into the crowd, trying to reassure the pair as she left them to join the major.

“Please don’t drag this out,” she warned Yellick.

Alberto was with them soon enough.

Yellick asked, “Is this everyone?”

Alberto closed his eyes, opening them again almost immediately. Close enough. “Yep.”

Yellick turned to the children and started speaking: his steady, well-calloused voice clear over their tears or questions. “You are all charged with defying official DDHA orders, as well as attempting to intimidate agents. Furthermore, you are also charged orchestrating terror attacks in Perth, the ACT, and Washington D.C, resulting in at least five hundred deaths, including many members of Federal Parliament.”

The students’ confusion reached new heights.

“What the hell are you on about?” shouted Linus.

Already in his mechanical form, Troy buzzed, “They’re trying to stitch us up!”

Mary Gillespie was clutched Lawrence’s arm. “Laurie, why are they saying these things?”

She saw the vacant, staring look on the old man’s face.

“Laurie… what did you do?”

Yellick continued, ignoring all protests. “The Commonwealth of Australia is willing to show you children clemency. Through service, you may repay your country.”

Bryant Cormey started laughing, high and horse. “You see what you’ve done? You fucking kids took something glorious and turned it into shite! Threw away a future for a few weeks of frolicking!”

“Someone’s picked up the boss-man’s vocab,” Alberto muttered.

Mary begged the other teacher. “Please, Bryant.  Don’t make it worse for them.”

Cormey kept on raving. “They deserve it!” He gestured around at the children. “Look at them! Gods cowering at Neanderthals with metal sticks!”

“Cormey,” Lawrence sighed. “It’s over. Let’s try and go with some dignity.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Be quiet, sir,” ordered Strikepoint, trying not to look at a white-haired boy crying into his hands at the edge of the crowd. “You’re frightening the children.”

A choked, manic giggle. “And who are you? The freak-finders’ pet demi?” He pantomimed peering at Strikepoint. “Are you even a super? Or did they just dress up some whore and hoped we bought it?”

“You don’t know what I am.”  

“Well then.”

There was no real reason for Strikepoint to have done anything when Bryant Cormey ran at her, screaming at the top of his tired lungs. He was a handcuffed, half-mad cultist whose world was falling apart. She, by definition, could not die.

But she was so angry.

Lightning lashed from Strikepoint’s eyes, striking Cormey right in his heart. He fell face forward in the dirt, the stench of burnt hair and flesh rising from his body.

She hadn’t meant to kill the poor fool.

Screaming. So much screaming. Children caught between their fear of what just happened and the guns still trained on them.

The wind screamed too, trying to match its mistress. Bella was on the ground, her hands over her head. Her unnatural, private hurricane tore blindly at soldier, student, and staff alike. Strikepoint tried to soothe the air, but the girl had a deathgrip on it.

“Is this one of you?” Yellick yelled over the roar. “Stop it immediately!”

Mary fought the wind, painfully forcing her way over to Bella and pulling her into an embrace.

“Please, she’s just scared!”

She shouldn’t have given Yellick something to aim at.

Mrs Gillespie collapsed, Bella Wilson still in her arms. Their blood mixed in the grass.

The children’s shouting and screams died. Louise stared at her teacher and her friend. “…Bella?”

Tom looked right at Major Yellick. His voice shook. “You—you fucks.”

Strikepoint had her hand over her mouth. “No…”

Alberto shook his head at the major. “They were an old lady and a fucking kid.”

“I—”  

“Mary!” Lawrence ran to Mrs Gillespie’s side, falling to his knees and draping himself over her body, weeping. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”    

Mavis eyes raked over the soldiers, her whole body shaking. When she finally her voice was wrong—like she was trying to build words out of the drone of locusts and hornets:

You bastards! You murdering fucking bastard—  

The sound tightened and bended through the air, lancing through the inner ears of half a dozen soldiers. Their eyes exploded from their heads in great bursts of blood.

Someone got off a lucky shot, but the spell was broken. The children fought back.

Tom’s ghost charged at a soldier. He passed through the man, taking most of his insides with him. The soldier’s mates fell upon and tried firing at the boy, but it was like trying to slay mist. Their bullets whizzed through him right into each other.

Tom glared contemptuously at the men bleeding their last around him, tears running down his face like rain on glass. White fuckers and their guns.

All around, troops were being sucked under the earth, down into new, unmarked graves. Dolls and toys clawed their way out of the Institute’s soil, clambering up legs to gouge out eyes and force their way down throats. Force fields opened over soldiers and snapped shut, leaving only piles of torn fabric and gristle. Others were smashed by invisible hammers, their legs snapping beneath them as their brains were driven into their ribcage.   

Not all the children fought. Sheilah and Bran were running towards one of her tears, hoping  to find refuge in the darkness, the former pulling her little sister behind them.

“I’m scared!” Dawn cried, light spilling wildly from her body.

Sheilah breathlessly tried reassuring her. “We’ll be alright, Dawnie! We just need to—”

The three passed into the dark. A bullet followed.

Louise was facing down five men alone. They kept pouring ammo into her, bullets falling undeformed at her feet as she walked steadily towards them. Every round made her glow brighter, till her skin was a white corona. All that kinetic energy had to go somewhere…

She clapped. The shockwave stripped muscle from bone.

It wasn’t completely one-sided. A clutch of burning soldiers managed to land a wild shot at Brian Peters’ head as they danced from his fire.

Brian Peters died. His flames did not.

Troy’s approach was simple. He grabbed a soldier, and pounded their face with his bronze, hydraulic powered fists till they no longer had a head.

Problem was, that left him exposed.

An explosive round went off in the boy’s side. Hundreds of error messages flashed across his mind in a single second. The missing chunk of himself shifted frantically between exposed, blasted metal struts and bloodied ribs, before settling on the machine. The light in his glass eyes went out.

Strikepoint kept throwing herself between the students and the soldiers, letting bullets and God knew what else draw gold ichor from her. She didn’t know what to do. Men were dying. Men were dying trying to murder children.  

“Please, we can stop this! We can all stop!”

Alberto was white as death. Lights he knew as well as the stars were going out all around. The ones that kept shining were doing things even he couldn’t have imagined. Couldn’t have considered. The whole Institute was flooded with light as black as smoke.

The psychic grabbed onto Major Yellick’s arm, turning the man around to face him. “Call them off!”

The major was staring at the carnage, forgotten by soldier and child alike. Slowly, he answered, “I don’t think I can.”  

Alberto shook the man. “Do something—” He shuddered. Robert Carrol just got a rifle butt to the head. He could feel the blood clotting in the boy’s brain. Staggering backwards, he stammered, “I can’t be here. I have to get away…”

Alberto ran for the trees. A familiar, reliable thought returned to Major Yellick’s awe-drunk mind:

Deserter.

He ran after the telepath. “Get back here, Moretti! Get back here!”  

Linus wandered numbly through the pockets of violence. His surviving foster-sister was launching white phosphorus at soldiers as they tried to mow down Jeremy, who was busy using his force-bubbles like a millstone on some of their comrades.

So many of his brothers had been heroes. Warriors. But Lucius Owens was not bred for battle. He could stop it, though. He didn’t have his guitar, but still had his voice.    

Linus breathed in, feeling the notes assemble themselves before him—

He felt the air cleave next to him

It almost felt like he’d been punched in the ribs. Linus’ hand went to his side. It came up bloody. As he fell backwards, an anti-note escaped him. It grew, gorging itself on the screams and the gunfire, leaving only scraps of silence in its wake.

All fighting came to a halt.

There was a man.

No, not a man. Not quite. His hair was like flame, his skin gold, clothed in a cloak woven from a thousand dawns. He was taller than any human man, and seemed somehow more real than everyone and everything around him: a three-dimensional object descended into a two-dimensional space.    

Everyone who could still stand was gripped by an urge to kneel before the newcomer. All except for Strikepoint.

He was family, after all.  

“Lucius!”

Apollo, lord of song ran to Linus’ side. He fell to his knees when he saw the blood seeping from Linus’ side, despair breaking across his perfect features. “My son,” he moaned, holding the boy’s head to his chest, “my son, what have they done to you?

Linus’ breath rattled. “Hey, Dad.”

Lawrence finally looked up from Mary and Bella. “My God,” he said, staring at the god. “You are real.”

The god ignored the old man. There was nothing else in creation but his son. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I left you…”

“Don’t—it’s fine, Dad. It’ll all be fine…”

Linus trailed off. He never came back.

Apollo wailed. His grief was like the sun setting at the end of the world.

Strikepoint approached the mournful deity. “Brother, I know how this feels—”

Apollo leapt to his feet, spinning around to face Strikepoint. With a sunburst, he conjured a bow and aimed it at the superheroine’s heart. “No,” he said. “You don’t.”

One of the surviving soldiers fired at the pair. The bullet dropped a few inches from Apollo, the grass beneath catching fire as it melted into a glowing red puddle.

“Shit—”

The soldier’s expletive was choked by a cough. His skin bubbled like boiling lava with sores and pustules. He died choking on his own blood and screams.

Apollo didn’t even look back at the man. Tonelessly, he said “Take off the mask.”

“Apollo—”

“Now.”

Strikepoint removed and threw aside her domino mask, staring at Apollo with her almost-black eyes.

“Why did you come here?”

“I wanted to help—”

Apollo roared, grabbing Helen by the neck and lifting her off the ground. His bright eyes had become solar eclipses, rimmed by white light. “You led these fools here! Made them brave!”         

The goddess did not struggle. Instead, she wheezed out, “Athena…”

Above the Institute, a mountain of cloud swelled and thundered. Lightning lit its dark face, briefly revealing the towering, regal silhouette of an armour-clad, spear-toting woman.

Pallas Athena, king of all the gods.

Her voice showered over the Institute like iron rain:

“Apollo, do put down our sister.”

The god tossed Helen to the dirt. The goddess gasped, savouring the taste of air again. Deep gold bruises were forming around her collarbone.

“Helen of Sparta, why have you drawn my eye?”

“My son died trying to put a stop to the fight she started! And now she tries to hide behind you!”

The thunder stirred again. “I was not asking you, Apollo. You will get your chance to speak.”

Helen managed to get back on her feet, looking up at the sky. “My king, I beg your aid.”

A sigh rippled through the grass. “Sister, what have you done now?”      

Shame like acid coursed through Helen. Was that her role in the world? Inflicting her mistakes on anyone who crossed her path? “The children need us.”

Apollo sneered at a pile of minced soldier. “I think they can look after themselves.”

“Please, brother—”

“Don’t call me that.”

Helen didn’t stop speaking. “The people who rule this country, they’ll never let the children live. Not after this. They’ll hound the children to the ends of the Earth.”

Apollo glanced around at the cowed students, his inner glow throwing veils of shadows across their faces. “These children’s brutality was half of what killed my Lucius. I don’t care what becomes of them.”

“I think your son would.”

Apollo turned to find Lana sitting beside Linus’ body. She was stroking his face, trying to comfort a boy who wasn’t there anymore.

Slowly, the god knelt down beside the girl. He studied the young woman’s face. “…You loved him, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did. We all did. He was my brother.”

For a moment, god and mortal spoke in the perfect language of silence.

Apollo noticed the young woman’s bump. “Was he—”

Lana shook her head. “No. Not this time. His son’s out there, though. I think he’s safe, but I don’t…” She went silent for a moment. “I hope I can see him again.”

Apollo nodded. “What else would a mother wish for?”

Helen found the dirty little girl and the sand-haired boy again in the crowd. The presence of gods and a talking cloud in their midst didn’t appear to interest them. They were looking at each other—and themselves—like they were strangers. Their faces and hands were stained with blood.

Time to be a superhero.        

“Your son would rest easier knowing his family was safe, I should think.”

Apollo sighed. “He would.”

The anger had drained from his lyre of a voice. It was resigned; tired and empty.

The human mien fell away. The sun burned high in the night sky, banishing the stars behind its glare.

“Three years durance, Helen. Our years.5”  

Helen nodded. “I understand.”

“Athena, take them away.”

“It will be done.”

Tom finally worked up the nerve to speak. “Excuse me…. Ma’am? Couldn’t you just bring everyone back? Linus?” He took a deep breath. “…Bella?”

Lightning flickered within the cloud. The goddess’ shadow seemed somehow pensive.

Tom didn’t know thunder could sound gentle:

“I’m sorry child, but some things are beyond even our powers.”

Tom wondered what the point of them was then.

The cloud twirled long and thin, swirling around the misplaced sun like the rings of Saturn.  

Fine, gleaming chains of adamantine sprouted around Helen’s wrists.

The sun and its ring descended towards the goddess, growing ever brighter. “When your durance is up, you will return to this place. You’ll meet two heroes, and join their cause till its end.”

“How will I know them?”

“One will be my son’s kin, the other… not.”

“Not?”

“You’ll know him when you see him.”

Lawrence started shouting, “Wait! Please, I’m sorry—”  

He was dignified no answer.

The sun engulfed Helen. The light was blinding.

The children were gone. All that remained were the soldiers, Lawrence, and their shared victims.     

1. He was out swimming when the bombs went off. ↩

2. Alberto sometimes wondered if the bloke who came up with the “sanctioned super” badges realized what he’d done or not. He wasn’t sure which would be worse. Or funnier. ↩

3. It was really the only way he stood a chance. ↩

4. In fact, Private Jerry Wilkins had scored high on three DOPO psychic sensitivity tests. ↩

5. Due to their somewhat broader view on time, the Olympians traditionally measure nine of our years as one. ↩

Previous Chapter                                                                                                           Next Chapter

Chapter Fifty-Three: The Shoal

Book Two: Titanomachy

Until he woke up that morning, Alberto Moretti had thought throwing his lot in with the government was the best decision he’d ever made. His workload as one of the Commonwealth’s rarer monsters made George Jetson1 look like a coal canary. In exchange for glancing at the brains of suspected communist moles2 and oracling the movements of the Viet Cong and the Flying Man, Alberto got to enjoy a kingly expense account, an executive suite at the Hotel Canberra, and access to ministerial-grade escorts. The only real downside was that he had to live in Canberra, but Alberto could see ways out. As long as it wasn’t the Institute.

Then one morning his hangover was interrupted by the world screaming. The world shook. Hundreds of lights fluttering on the edge of Alberto’s vision were snuffed out all at once.    

The hotel had been bombed. Parliament House had been bombed. The Prime Minister’s house had been bombed. Robert Menzies was dead. His bloody wife was dead. And so, so many others.

Alberto knew the culprit as soon as Timothy Valour briefed him.

“Canberra isn’t the only place that got hit.” Valour thumbed vainly at his lighter’s spark-wheel, a cigarette hanging limp and unlit from between his lips. His fingers felt numb and clumsy. Like they weren’t his own. “The Americans say the Pentagon and DOPO headquarters both had bombs go off the same minute as us3. It can’t be a coincidence.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Alberto replied. “Anywhere else?”

“One of our regional offices got wiped out.”

Alberto still found thinking of himself as part of the DDHA odd. It was like taking up Devil worship after years of Sunday school. Immensely satisfying, even thrilling4 on many levels, strange and chancy on others. “…That office wouldn’t happen to be Perth, would it?”

Timothy looked away from the esper. It was only a slight turn of his head. The old airman probably didn’t realize he was doing it. “Yes.”

“Tim—”

Valour cut Alberto off before he could put voice to what they both were thinking. “Let’s not go jumping to conclusions, Moretti. We still don’t know who did this.”

That was what Alberto was supposed to find out. The psychic looked out the tinted, bulletproofed backseat window of the DDHA sedan he was riding in, his head lolling against the cheap imitation leather of his headrest.

The Flying Man may have doused the fires and pulled the survivors out of the fresh ruins, but  Canberra’s wounds were still raw and bleeding, pouring white smoke high into the sky. A full six of the nine confirmed or suspected bombs had gone off in that drearily singular planned city. Hundreds had died in the explosions themselves, with the hospitals added more names to the casualty list seemingly every minute.  And thanks to Walter Burley Griffith’s love of open vistas, you could see the results from nearly any in the city. It was like the Germans had hit King’s Park. 

Alberto screwed his eyes shut. His head was throbbing. The Canberran aether burned cold with fear and knotted panic, slicked through with sickly violet paranoia. Bovegno under the blackshirts had been like this. But at least people there had learned to compartmentalize the dread. Wading through it all was like trying to navigate an arctic sea littered with depth charges. He was suddenly very grateful he had been in the countryside during the Cuban Crisis.        

How did I miss this? Alberto kept asking himself through the migraine. For God’s sake, a bomb had gone off in his hotel! He’d glimpsed plenty of outlandish, far-out futures in the storm of possibility since moving to Canberra. Spontaneous Russian rearmament, alien invasion5, even Menagerie marching on the city with a herd of war-elephants, but not that. It was an intruder in the timeline. An ace of spades slipped into the tarot deck.  

The car eventually came to a halt. The chauffeur (a Physician drone by the looks of him, cheap bastards) scurried to open the passenger door, and Alberto stepped out in front of Parliament House.  

What was left of it.

From the terrace, the place almost looked unscathed. Then you noticed the broken windows and the charring beyond the missing front-doors, or the inescapable stench of ash and carbonized flesh. If you were to approach Parliament House from the air—as the Flying Man no doubt had—you’d see the smoking crater where the Senate and the House of Representatives used to be6. The building’s heart had been burned out. The whole complex had been cordoned off with yards of blue and white police-tape. Alberto thought it was a laughable fig-leaf. How could any of this possibly be contained?

Soldiers and coppers were milling uselessly about the grounds. Alberto could sense many of them congregating inside Allison’s living tree fort down by the lake, brandishing their respective jurisdiction’s phallic symbols at each other to try and forget their own powerlessness. Maybe that would be the new Provisional Parliament House.

All Alberto knew was that he wanted to get away from this place as soon as possible. He laid down on the sedan’s bonnet.

“Are you unwell, Mr. Moretti?” the chauffeur-minion asked flatly.

Alberto closed his eyes. It was time to be Tiresias again. “No, Mr. Whoo. I’m remembering.”

The psychic got up out of his body. Astral projection, Alberto thought was the term. The main difference he felt was that his naked mind or soul or what have you didn’t suffer nicotine cravings.

His shade climbed the ashen steps of 18 King George Terrace, up into its past. The sun flickered east, night’s shadow flowing over Alberto twice in as many moments. For a few fleeting seconds, the Flying Man hovered above the scene, his expression grave, but curious. Alberto almost thought he was looking down at him.

As if in anger, Parliament House screamed with flames. That seemed to scare the Flying Man off.

Alberto slowed his pace. Not his walking pace—or whatever one did when you’d already left your feet behind—but his pace through time. The world slowed with him.

He watched as the fire coalesced into a terrible, bulging wall of light. It began to retreat, the air in front of Alberto cooling like the tide pulling back from the sea. Specks of glass hail flew from the ground and unlucky passersby into vacant, staring window frames, fusing back together into unbroken panes.

As the explosion shrunk deeper into the building, Alberto’s spirit crept in after it—a ghost stalking the sun. The destruction led the esper up the front staircase into King’s Hall, the antechamber between the Senate and the House of Representatives. Alberto remembered it from the tour they went on back during the August trip. No snow now, only ash. He saw errant kings and prime ministers return to their portraits as the light washed over them, while scorched paint became white again. Blasted chairs and tables reassembled themselves as if Mary Poppins was starring in Bridge on the River Kwai.

Often, the light gave back people. Politicians and their harried staff. Wives and their bored children. Alberto could almost see their final thoughts. It felt like being tickled in the dark on a ghost-train.

At one point, the explosion pulled back to reveal a woman. A pretty young thing. Blonde. Some senator’s secretary, Alberto guessed. He watched as the fire gave her back her flesh, like God building an angel in real time. She looked bored. Alberto had to imagine she didn’t feel a thing.

The explosion began to collapse on itself, revealing parquetry floors of silver ash wood and jarrah as it recoiled from Alberto like a frightened beast. It spat out King George Ⅴ, stately in his bronze clothes and skin. A human king, whose power rested in the faith of other human beings. Alberto wondered how many of those were still to come

Soon the blast was small enough for a child to pick up and hold, cowering under a coffee table by a corner column. It retreated back into its egg and…

A green flash.

Alberto opened his eyes. Some iron-haired, corporeal looking bastard was looking down at him.

“Agent Moretti, is something the—”

Alberto grabbed hold of the soldier, pulled himself upright by his lapels, and hissed, “Get Timothy Valour on the phone and tell him Herbert Lawrence is a cunt.”

⬗

Allison Kinsey stood in front of the barn’s east wall against the setting afternoon sun, admiring what she had wrought. Her skin was mottled blue and green, her hair matted with half-dried paint.

Most importantly, she was very, very satisfied.

It started about a week earlier. Somehow, against all reason, Allison had found herself getting bored. Bored running around being all barbarian with David and whoever fell into their orbit. She didn’t understand how, but she knew it must be fought. It also occurred to Allison that non-Watercolours kept trespassing inside their barn. This too could not go unopposed.

David had seemed strangely unconcerned. “It’s not like there’s a big sign saying we own it.”

He was right, though. There was no sign. Allison decided to rectify that.

Painting a little over seven by thirty feet of wall by herself was easier than one might have guessed. Allison saved herself a lot of ladder hauling by borrowing Robert’s (formerly Gwydion’s) translucent platforms. The Barthe dress code meant paint-stains were a non-issue, and their hydrokinesis made for an excellent long range brush. Plus, thanks to Eliza, she only really needed about an hour of sleep a night.       

A shoal of mer-children7 swirled and sported together in a loose ring under the wave-broken light of a full moon, just below the skin of the sea. Their scales glinted cerulean, electric green, and flame-red against the pearly glow. One chestnut-haired young mermaid8 floated in the middle of the halo, arms outstretched for her companions, light filtering through the delicate webs between her fingers. If you asked the artist, they were playing tag.   

Allison cleared her throat, taking in Mavis’ breathy song:

Watercolours, assemble!

Thirty seconds of foot-tapping.

I said ‘assemble!’

Arnold’s voice shouted distantly. “Alright, we’re coming! Jeez.”

Unsurprisingly, David arrived well before the teleporter, condensing from the humidity along with his mother.    

“Ooh rah,” Françoise exclaimed as she looked the mural up and down. “Very nice, mon chéri.”

Floating as a boy-shaped cloud, David swirled around the painted merfolk, ice crystals ringing, “How’d you make the scales so shiny?”

Allison shrugged modestly. “Wasn’t that hard.”

Arnold finally caught up, Billy in tow. Once the former boy was done panting, he looked up at the merfolk. He nodded as cooly as he could. “Neat,” he remarked casually, only to blush when he got a good look at one of the sea-children. Allison had managed to translate his lightning into scale. “Really neat.”

Billy’s enthusiasm was far louder. He pointed a clawed finger toward the topmost mer-child. “That one has tiger-stripes!”

Allison smiled. “You noticed! I thought about giving him fur, but it looks weird underwater.”

“There’s seals,” Billy pointed out.

“True.”

“How do you know that one’s a boy?” Arnold asked.

Allison frowned. “Because I painted him.”

Roland Barthes1 wouldn’t put out “The Death of the Author” for another two years, so Arnold’s only response was, “You can’t see their bits.”

Fran scowled playfully, “Don’t be rude, Arnold.”

“You’re naked.”

“That’s incidental and you know it, young man.”

Allison wrinkled her nose. She was the artist, Arnold was just the consumer. She outranked him.

Suddenly, the moonlight in the painting warbled, making shadows dance on the young merfolk’s skin as they fled from the child they’d been circling. The one with the tiger-striped tail broke away from the chase, swimming down in front of Billy. His hair was a blonde mop, tinted green by the water, framing mud-brown eyes. He beamed a sharp, toothy grin, which Billy gleefully returned10.

Allison grinned too, folding her arms and glancing smugly at Arnold. “That look like a boy?”

Arnold sniffed. “Girls can have short hair too, sexist.”

“Well, whatever it is, it’s lovely,” Françoise said. She kissed Allison on the temple. “You know, Allie, there’s plenty of big, blank walls around here that could do with sprucing up…”

Allison wiggled at the compliment even as she briefly thought about objecting. It was all other people’s skill, same as always. Maestros and amateur housewives alike had all left their mark on the girl. But even if all those artists had gotten together and painted the barn themselves, they wouldn’t have made this. They wouldn’t have seen the moon from the bottom of the river like she had, or have played chasey underwater. They probably didn’t even appreciate mermaids the way Allison did11.

It was hers. No one else’s.

Seeing her creation in motion reminded Allison of something. “What’s taking Mabel so long?”

Everyone looked at Allison like Mabel was long dead.

“I think Mabel’s still having quiet time,” said Françoise.

“Still? It’s been ages!”

“Allison, what Mabel admitted at the bonfire… it was very hard for her.”

“So? How is sulking in the bush going to help with that?” Allison turned and started trotting towards the Institute’s treeline. “I’m gonna find her. We can make the merlings fight. That’ll cheer her up.”

David’s eyes shot between his friend and his mother, before seemingly asking both, “That a good idea?”

Fran shrugged. “I don’t think having friends around would hurt.”

“Course it won’t!” replied Allison. She grabbed David’s hand and started pulling him along. “Cheering up is what friends are for!”

Powerless before her might, the other children followed Allison.

Françoise watched them go. Mabel would be fine. Allie would be fine. David was more than fine.

Maybe she’d take him to see Ralph sometime.

Or his grandfather.

⬗

As the Watercolours made their way to Mabel’s hideaway—Allison following the echo of her song—the topic of conversation turned to the most recent news at the Institute:

“…Easter eggs! It’s not even Christmas yet!”

“Do we do Christmas here?” asked Billy.

Allison answered, “Nope. Mavis says they haven’t for like, ten years. Maybe this year, though.”

“Seriously, why would Laurie want to send people Easter eggs?”

Billy’s tail lashed the air thoughtfully. “Were they chocolate?”

“I don’t think so… they were more orna…ornomatic?”

“Ornamental,” Allison corrected her friend.

“Yeah, that!”

“Maybe they were bribes? He is in big trouble.” Allison said it like Lawrence had been caught nicking baking chocolate from the pantry.

“I’d have used chocolate ones for that,” opined Billy.

Arnold kicked up some grass. “I still don’t know why Mary’s letting him stay. What’s the use of kicking someone out if you’re just going to let them sleep on your floor in a week?”

Allison quirked her shoulders. “I don’t care. Laurie can’t do anything to us, and they’re gonna come drag him to jail soon anyway. It’s like having a pet.”

“A very beardy pet,” Billy added.

The Watercolours’ discussion on the merits of a pet Oxfordian was cut short when Bryant Cormey staggered into their path. He was clad in grass-stained flannel pyjamas, while his unkempt beard looked like it was trying to evolve into his employer’s. The teacher was brandishing one of the beers the Northamites had donated12.

“Well look who it is,” Cormey jeered, “It’s Mealy and the Watered-Downs.”

David rolled his eyes. “Really, Bryant? You’re stealing jokes from little kids now? I think Ophelia used to call us that.”

“You looking for your girlfriend?” Arnold asked with a sneer. “I think he’s still crying in Therese’s cottage!”

Allison snorted. “You scared her away, didn’t you, Cormey? Made her put on a fake-beard when you kissed?

Without thinking, Bryant threw his beer bottle at Allison.

She let the glass shatter against her suddenly bronze skin, puffing out her chest like Superman taking a few bullets from Metropolis’s dumbest crooks. “Nice try,” she buzzed robotically.

Billy fumed. “Teachers aren’t supposed to throw things!”

“Oh, fuck off, you bloody mutant pity-case.”

Billy clenched his fists, breathing slowly and deeply.

“Aww, Bill,” said Arnold, “don’t go listening to—”

Billy vanished. A trail of grass started flattening from where he stood.

“…Bugger.”

Cormey smirked. “Not so tough? Just you wait, Lawrence is going to whip this place back into—”

Billy appeared behind the man and roared, sending the teacher flying over his friends’ heads. By the time Bryant had somewhat regained his bearings, the Watercolours were giggling off in the distance.

Arnold clapped Billy on the back as they ran. “Nice one, Growly.”

It wasn’t long before they reached the bush, long grass giving way to an autumn and winter’s worth of fallen leaves that crunched beneath their feet. Arnold occasionally blasted away a bramble or small tree from their path.

Then they ran into the witch. At least the Watercolours assumed she was meant to be a witch. The withered crone was decked out in a tattered robe the exact shade of dark green as a heavy duty rubbish bin.

She was clearly one of Mabel’s puppets. The shadow under her hood was too perfect. Allison seriously doubted she had anything besides a mouth and a nose under there.

“Who goes there?” the witch intoned in a voice like wind funneled through sandpaper.

“We’re here to see Mabel!” Billy replied cheerfully.

“You seek the Creator?” asked the hag. “Then you must answer these three—”

Allison huffed loudly, blowing a lock of hair from in front of her face. “Don’t be dumb, Mabs. We just want to see you.”

The witch made a sweeping gesture. “But first—”

“Mabel.”  

Her arm dropped to her side like an actress who just noticed the looks on their audience’s faces. “Fine,” she said in a young girl’s voice, before turning around and starting to walk off. “Follow the crone,” she commanded, still with Mabel’s voice.

The crone led the children to a familiar clearing: the one where Arnold had teleported the earth from under the lads from Northam’s feet. The water that had filled the resulting pit during the rainy season had almost completely dried away, save a forlorn puddle waiting to be drank by the tree roots snaking through the crater-walls. Scattered about the place were the sleeping ashes of a campfire, an icebox, and a pile of books and drawing supplies resting on a picnic blanket.   

It was by this dismal view Mabel had hung her hammock. She was nestled with an open copy of Walkabout, the lady astronaut occasionally nudging the hammock in absence of any breeze. “Five years in the academy and this is what you make me do…”

Mabel ignored the space-adventurer, instead listlessly greeting her friends. “Hi guys.”

Billy gazed around the clearing like he had stepped into the Taj Mahal. “Wow, great camp you got here Mabs!”

Mabel supposed this did count as camping. “Thanks.”

“Allie finished her painting,” Arnold said.

“Mural.”

“Whatever.”

“Yeah,” Mabel said. “I kinda guessed,”

The astronaut cut-in sourly, “Almost blew our eardrums out, you mean.”

“Shush up, you.”

Allison flung herself onto the hammock with enough force she almost sent Mabel tumbling off. “Why didn’t you come look?”

Mabel scratched her hair, not looking the other girl in the eye. “I… I just… look, it’s not like it’s going to disappear, you know?”

There was something plaintive in Allison’s voice. “But it’s new.”

“You’d like it,” said Billy. “It’s got mermaids!”

That got Mabel’s interest. She looked at Allison. “…Seashell bras?”

“Course not.”

“Stupid things… maybe later.”

Allison slumped onto her back. “Come on…”

“It’s actually pretty neat,” Arnold said. “Good…” He tried to think of an art term. “…use of space. Didn’t go over the edges or anything.”

Mabel shouted, “I’m not in the mood, alright!”

Nobody spoke.

Except for Allison. “When will you be in the mood?”

Mabel spent a moment trying to figure out how to say she couldn’t know that, then gave up. “Later!”

“Well, what if I’m not in the mood later?”

Mabel blinked at the other girl. “…What?”

“What if I don’t want to show you when you are in the mood?”

“…It’s the side of a barn. You don’t need to show me.”

“Yes I do! You’re not allowed to look at it without me!”

“You can’t say that!”

“Yes I can! It’s my mural!”

“This is stupid!”

“Then can you please just be in the mood right now?”

Mabel crossed her arms and sighed. “Fine.”

Allison made a pleased noise, grabbing Mabel and pulling her into one of Cardea’s rifts.

“Well,” she said, arms spread in front of her creation, “what do you think?”

Mabel shuffled her feet. She liked the mural, she really did. And she appreciated Allison not making all the merfolk thin. She just had no space in her to be cheerful about it. “It’s good,” she mumbled. “Can we go back to my camp now?”

Allison pouted. “Sure, sure.”

A couple seconds and a few hundred yards of squeezed spacetime later, the girls were sitting back in the hammock.

“I don’t know why you’re being so weird about the Circle’s End thing,” Allison said while she picked at her toenails.

Mabel just stared at her. She couldn’t name what she was feeling. It was a bright, livid thing—beyond anger, confusion, or offense,  but claiming descent from all of them.

She glanced over at the boys, as though they could somehow explain what Allison had just said. All three of them appeared to have suddenly realized they were standing on a big white “X” in the middle of the Nevada desert.

“Allie, you do know what happened to me at Circle’s End, right? What I did?”

“I was there when you said it, wasn’t I? Your powers turned on and killed a lotta people.”

“And my dad.” Mabel would’ve cried then, but she’d had plenty of time to do that the last week or so. Her grief was a snapped tendon, too weak to support her.

“Yes. It’s awful and everything, but you didn’t mean to, did you?”

Mabel sighed. “No. I didn’t. But I think… doing that to people changes something. Something inside your guts. Even when you didn’t mean to. You’re not the same after.”

Allison tilted her head. “…That doesn’t explain why you’re hiding out here?”

“It doesn’t?”

“No,” Allison answered flatly. “I mean, if you think about it, you wouldn’t have changed when you fessed up, you’d have changed back in Circle’s End, and none of us knew you back then.”

“…Everyone looked at me weird.”

“Maybe at the bonfire yeah, but nobody’s seen you since then. How would ya know they’d keep doing that?”

“Seems kinda likely?”

“I’m not looking at you any different.”

Mabel didn’t know how to put it kindly.

Allison pointed at David. “Davie! Did you know about this before?”

“Yeah,” David admitted.

“See, nothing’s changed for him. And David’s worth like, ten other kids.”

David was glad his blush didn’t show.

Allison leaned back, a slight smile gracing her lips. “And Fran killed people for fun when she was littler than us. Are you scared of her?”

“…Kinda?” answered Mabel.

“To be fair,” said David. “A bunch of those people were Nazis.”  

Allison moved onto Billy. “What about you, Growly? You scared of Mabel?”

“No siree,” he answered with all the earnestness in the world.

“Arnold?”

The boy shrugged. “She chased me with a Dalek our first day.” He smiled. “I’ve always been scared of her.”

Mabel realised she was smiling, too. She tried shaking it off her face like a bug. She looked at Allison. “Why are you trying so hard?”

“Because I painted a very good mermaid picture and you should appreciate it more. And you’ve always tried really hard with me. Even back when I thought you were weird and scary.”

Mabel rested her head on the other girl’s shoulder. “…I’ll come back tomorrow, okay?”

“Sure,” replied Allison. “Mind if we camp here with you tonight?”

“No problem.”

Billy squeaked in delight, running off back towards the Institute in search of sleeping bags and marshmallows.

When the sun finally set, they relit Mabel’s campfire. Allison rattled off what felt like hundreds of ghost stories, which somehow all managed to end with her roaring and flailing her arms around at everyone. Mabel swore for a moment she’d managed to grab hold of the shadow-puppets. On a dare, Billy downed some of the funny-juice, and strewed the clearing with spongy rocks and ruby quartz silly string.

They stayed up well past any notion of bedtime, but sleep claimed them all in the end. Allison was even grateful for it, after an almost entirely wakeful week of hard painting.

It was still dark when the cracks woke her up. They were distant, but sharp. Allison rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She could hear shouting: not too unusual at the post-Lawrence Institute, but this didn’t sound like the usual rough play.

Those cracks again. They sounded a little like the noise the air made when Jumpcut teleported, only—  

Gunshots.

Allison shook Mabel hard. “Mabs, wake up!” she whispered harshly. “Wake up!”

The girl jerked awake, blinking up at Allison through her lensless spectacles. “What’s going on?”

More cracks.

“I think someone’s shooting—”

A voice like breaking marble sliced through the trees:

You bastards! You murdering fucking bastard—  

There was a terrible, awful noise.

There was a terrible, awful silence.

1. Regular access to television was one of many things Alberto appreciated about life beyond the Institute. Part of him suspected that Darren Stephens was Herbert Lawrence’s equal and opposite in the cosmos. ↩

2. Just like old times. ↩

3. Both the Pentagon and DOPO’s Washington headquarters weathered the explosions far better than their Australian counterparts, the former due to the Pentagon’s extensive structural reinforcement and the latter thanks to energy sapping enchantments placed on the grounds by Howard Pendergast. The time-zone difference also played a role in reducing casualties. ↩

4. The only time the word “thrilling” was ever used in relation to the DDHA. ↩

5. If you could call John Smith’s people coming for him an invasion. ↩

6. Like many other aspects of modern Australia, her political system is a nightmarish hybrid of Great Britain and the United States. ↩

7. Allison wondered what the proper term would be. Fry? ↩

8. Allison had considered sprinkling in some grown mermaids and mermen, but she was aesthetically opposed to seashell bras, and didn’t want to risk scandalizing Mrs Gillespie. ↩

9. No relation. ↩

10. Allison justified it to herself as an adaptation to a carnivorous diet. ↩

11. As she saw it, mermaids could go almost anywhere, and the places they couldn’t were boring. ↩

12. The fact that almost everyone at the Institute was underage didn’t seem to occur to the kindly townspeople. Alberto certainly hadn’t complained. ↩

Previous Chapter                                                                                                           Next Chapter

Chapter Fifty-Two: No Enemy Shall Gather Our Harvest

Book Two: Titanomachy

Elsa Lieroinen. Lawrence could swear he had heard the name before. But where?

A man stepped out from behind the woman. His thin, pale body was wrapped tight in a red tuxedo, and a black, swirled moustache rested like an octopus on top of his bloodless lips. He glanced curiously at the old Oxfordian. “Is this him?” he asked Elsa. Lawrence thought the man sounded Greek.

“Yep.”

“He looks like Henry the VIII. Better beard, though.”

The pair nodded at each other, their noses wrinkled in mutual amusement. Lawrence got the impression of close friends whose subtle gestures had contaminated one another.

He tried shaking off the shock. “Excuse me, but what have you done to Pierce?”

Elsa and the pale man both ignored Lawrence, the latter striding over to where Pie-Man still stood ready to kick. “This one important?”

Elsa shook her head, before letting a hazel wand slip out from her billowing sleeve. She raised it over head like a conductor’s baton. “Help yourself.”

Pie-Man suddenly took a sharp, gasping breath, stumbling as he lost his balance.“What the—”  He caught sight of the man in the red tux. “Who the hell are you?”

The man threw his head back, mouth open to reveal pointed canines, and then—  

The world hissed and buzzed with static like an out of tune television set. When it resolved, Lawrence found himself sitting on a counter-stool downstairs in the bar, Elsa and her companion flanking him on either side. The man was dabbing at his chin with a paper napkin.

Lawrence screamed at the sudden relocation. The deep, hyperventilating breaths he took as he scanned his surroundings didn’t help. The bar was wrong. It wasn’t just that the bar was dead empty on a Thursday night. Colour was bright and queasy, like his eyes had been replaced with shoddy colour cameras. His breath rasped in his lungs as though the air had been carved sharp, while the warm pub lights weighed heavy on his skin. All that could be seen through the windows was a wall of green fog.

He stared at the woman, eyes widening in panic. “How are you doing this?”

Elsa inserted a cigarette into a long, elegant holder. It lit of its own accord, her answer riding a gust of smoke. “If I just said ‘my powers,’ you’d believe me. Oh, sure, you might have follow-up questions—in fact, I know you would—but you would accept the premise. If I told you that I’m a witch and this is an ingenious skein of spells, you would roll your eyes and set your psychiatrist brain to diagnose me with something or other.” She put a hand under her chin and smiled. “Why is that, Dr. Lawrence?”

Lawrence didn’t answer her question. “Where’s Pierce? What have you done with him?”

“You do remember he was about to kick the shit out of you, right?” asked Elsa.

“Besides,” said the man, “here he comes now.”

Pie-Man slid in front of the three as if on wheels. His features were slack and fungal white—less expressive than a corpse. Atonally, he asked, “Can I get you all a drink?”

“Pierce!” Lawrence cried. “What’s wrong with you?”

The man in the tuxedo waved his hand. His face was feverishly flushed now, revealing a jagged scar running down his cheek like dragon’s teeth. “Don’t bother the poor bloke, he’s mostly leaves now. It’s Myles, by the way.”

Elsa raised two fingers. “Pints of bitter all around, barkeep.” She looked back at Lawrence while Pie-Man poured their draughts. “I’ve programmed him with all the drink names and some shitty jokes. Should tide people over till he starts to rot.”

Lawrence hands slammed onto the edge of the counter as he tried to push off from his seat.

A voice like breaking ice. “Don’t run.”

His legs went numb. “What do you want with me?”

“Simple,” said Elsa. “We want to talk about the New Human Institute.”

“We worry you’re giving up too hastily,” Myles continued.

Lawrence’s shoulders shrunk defensively. “What do you know about the Institute? About me?”

Elsa shrugged. “Only what we’ve read in your book, and the ones people write about you.”

Are they precogs, or just stupidly cryptic?   

Elsa titled her hand. “A little from column A, a little from column B. Also, the House of Ghosts ripped you off.”

Lawrence desperately tried to void his thoughts. It didn’t work.

“Tut tut,” said Myles. “Doing an awfully shabby job at this headmaster thing, aren’t you?”

Fear and confusion should have left no room in Lawrence for outrage, but still it found him. “You don’t know what I’ve been through! The things I’ve had to do, what I’ve lost! What those children put me through! I gave them paradise, and they treated me like dung on their shoes!” He slumped miserably, his suit crumpling around him like a collapsing circus tent. “I’m lucky to be alive.”

Elsa and Myles looked past the old man at each other, before breaking out in laughter.

“Oh, God.” Myles wiped at his eyes, shoulders still rolling with mirth. “How do you live in that head of yours?”

“It gets better!” Elsa waved her wand, pulling Lawrence’s diary out from nowhere.

Lawrence tried to snatch back the little leather volume. “Give me that—”

A shadow solid as obsidian caught his arm, sprouting from behind Myles as he went to read over his mistress’s shoulder.

Elsa recited from the book in an odd hybrid of Liverpudlian and BBC English. “ ‘Oh, my sweet Maelstrom, how could I let that ash-pale nymph corrupt you so?’ ” Laughter overtook the witch again. “It’s like if William Blake was a perv.”

Myles hummed thoughtfully. “I get more of a Ralph Chubb impression.”

“Who’s Ralph Chubb?”

“One of those Uranian poets you only search for incognito1.”

Lawrence struggled futilely against Myles’ shade. “Is this all I’m here for? Did you two ghouls drag me down here and”—he glanced at poor, empty Pie-Man mechanically sliding beers across the counter—“…bewitch Pierce just so you could throw my sorrows back at me? Tears began cutting all too familiar paths down Lawrence’s face. “Because trust me, there is nothing you can do that would bring me any lower.”

Myles grinned at the old man. His teeth were stained red. “Oh, Laurie, never say that.”

Lawrence felt the shadow start to prickle against his skin, but at the same moment, Elsa put a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Now, now, Myles, Dr. Lawrence is right. We’re letting pleasure get in the way of business. Pull yourself together, will you?”

Myles made a disappointed grunt, and his shadow melted back into the floor.

Elsa pulled her stool in closer to Lawrence, tapping the side of his pint glass. “I suggest you drink, Doctor.”

Lawrence stared at her in disbelief. “You think I’d drink anything you’d give me?”

A kindly smirk. “Laurie, Laurie,” she gestured around grandly at the transfigured public bar, “do you think I need drugs?”

Resignedly, Lawrence drank deep, slamming the glass back down.

“Tell me, Doctor, what started this enthusiasm of yours for superhumans?”

A warm, drowsy sensation swilled about inside Lawrence. What was this beer’s proof? “Didn’t need drugs” his rump. Still, better than cold, hard sobriety.

“Do I need a reason?”

Elsa shrugged. “I’ve always thought of supers as being rather like very stupid witches who only know one spell.”

Lawrence didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or smack the woman in the face. Probably both. He did chuckle, though. “You do know some posthumans have more than one ability, don’t you? The Flying Man springs immediately to mind.”

“That hardly dilutes my lady’s point.”

“I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t be fascinated with posthumanity. Even forgetting what… what they mean for us, for the future, their powers are a glimpse at true physics. At the way the universe really works.”

That raised another laugh from the strangers.

Lawrence took another gulp of his beer. “Go ahead and laugh. It’s a change from the sneers and bitterness. And at least you never loved me…”

Elsa tossed her wand in her hand. “See, that to me justifies an interest. Avid study, even. But this pure, endless devotion? Pouring your life and fortune into a kennel for stray gods? Breeding them?”

“Now you listen here young—”

Elsa put a finger to the old man’s lips. It might as well have been a needle and thread. He felt his cheeks swell out as he let out the air for the final word, his lips refusing to let it leave his mouth.

“It has to be more than scientific curiosity, Lawrence. Whatever your training, we both know you’re a man of passion, not science.” Her hand drifted down to one of Lawrence’s hands. At her touch, his glove evaporated, revealing the old burns beneath. “Tell us, how did you get these scars?”

Lawrence sighed. Why not the truth? All lies had done was bring him here. “I was always interested in new humans, I really was. Since Oxford, at least. Posthumans didn’t just pop into the world in 1939, you know. I wanted to be a psychiatrist, and they were the fringe of a fringe. Madmen who happened to be right. But yes, that’s all it was, back then. An interest. Like bird-watching. But there was this girl…”

Sweet, wordless singing, drifting like mist down the inn’s stairs.

“She lived in Jericho, on the Oxford canal. She had always lived by the canal, if you asked her neighbours. She never lit a fire, but her house was always warm as high summer, and her garden stayed in bloom all through the winter.”

“Cheap tricks,” muttered Elsa.

Out the corner of his eye, Lawrence saw something shift out the windows. The witch watched smugly as the old man went to investigate.

The green fog that pressed so thick against the glass had receded, but so had Northam. Instead, Lawrence saw brightly painted narrowboats cutting through Oxford canal. In the strip of garden between him and the water, a young woman with silver-dark hair fussed over a rose bush, her bare fingers fearing no thorns.

Lawrence put his bare hand against the window. “Maren…”

Rose-vines crept up and over the windowpane, its blossoms rushing through childhood until the glass was opaque with red, pink, and white petals.

“Maren Reoch of Jericho,” Elsa recited. “As names go, it’s no Soulmother of Küssnacht, but is anything? The people of Oxford called her a seer.”

Lawrence didn’t even bother to dispute the wording. “She was. She predicted Bloody Sunday over tea with me. People in Jericho said she had known the Archduke of Austria had been shot before the papers, and that she’d talked about the Czar like he was a deadman since 1910.” A sad smile. “The poor thing thought she was a witch.”

Elsa and Myles both kept their peace on that.

“I’ll tell you this, she slipped me more than a few exam questions. Once, she practically dictated me a whole essay. But they were my words. They just hadn’t been written yet…”

“I assume you keep in touch?” Myles asked jovially.

Lawrence blinked back more tears. He hated telling this story. It made him feel like a male Miss Havisham. Like his entire life’s work was just trying to make up for it. “There was this doctor. Old gent. One of those ‘pillars of the community.’ But his roots in Oxford were shallow. His family didn’t remember Maren calling the Civil War for the Roundheads, or even the Glorious Revolution. They thought she was mad. Tried to have her committed.”

Shouting leaked down through the upstairs floorboards, muffled but still audible.

“You’ll remember me when your blood’s mixing with the rain!”

Lawrence slumped down beneath the window. “The stupid bastard slipped on the pavement the next morning. Cracked his head open. His wife got their friends together…”

Elsa nodded. “That’d do it.”

Crackling, a dull roar. The gnawing of wood by flame. Lawrence sniffed. Smoke. He stared up at Elsa. “You wouldn’t…”

A man burst into the bar. A boy, really, but so broad and stocky you could hardly tell, especially not with his face half-masked by a bright red beard.

The sight of his long ago self stung Lawrence like an old war-wound. How could these people be so cruel?

“Maren!” the young man shouted, his accent rougher than what it would become. He scanned wildly around the bar, seeing somewhere altogether different. An ancient house, the man he became remembered, populated by centuries of dust and keepsakes. He called Maren’s name again and charged up the stairs, towards the baleful orange glow at their summit.

Elsa tried pulling Lawrence to his feet. “Get up.”

The man’s voice was quiet, trembling like a child with a broken bone that needed setting. “I don’t want to.”

An electric current coursed through him, spasmodically forcing him upright. “You need to see this.”

On the second floor of Maren’s home, young Lawrence was trying to force his way through a sturdy wooden door. Without thinking, he grabbed for the doorknob, only to shriek as the red hot metal sizzled into the skin of his palm. He tore his hand away, now missing a wide patch of flesh. Still undeterred, he threw his great frame against the door, knocking it down.

“A town tried burning me once,” said Elsa, mildly, “didn’t take, but it hurt like a bitch.”

The former Lawrence stumbled back out onto the landing, Maren cradled in his arms. Flame was turning her silver-dark hair charred and golden. Her whole body was smouldering. Lawrence’s face was twisted with a despair he wouldn’t know again till Panoply, a muted howl on his lips.

Elsa chuckled.

“You know, Lawrence. You almost used to be impressive.”

“She was already dead when I got to her,” he said forty-five years later. “Smoke inhalation. A mercy, really.”

Lawrence closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he and the laughing, smiling fiends were back down in the pub. He did not question the transition. “A witch burning. An honest to God witch burning in 1920!”

“More likely than you think,” commented Elsa. “Still happens all the time in bits of Africa and New Guinea. They’re basically where Christians go to hurt people when it becomes unfashionable.”

Myles chuckled. “Just wait till they outlaw sodomy over here.”

Lawrence growled, “But in the middle of Oxford. And they didn’t just destroy some mumbling old beggar-woman—”

“Nice,” said Elsa, deadpan.

“—They killed a wonder. And that’s what humans do. Our ugly, stupid fear spoils everything. Every time.”

Elsa sipped her beer genteely. “You know, I have eighteen sons and daughters, and not one of them has failed to disappoint me. They’re still mine. Do you have any children, Lawrence?”

Lawrence clenched his burnt fist. “Yes. Nearly forty of them. And I will not let my kind use their bones to kill each other.” A groaning sigh. “But what can I do?”           

Elsa and Myles looked at each other. A quick, almost invisible nod. The witch turned to look at the headmaster. “What would you give, Doctor, if it would save your students?”

“Anything.” Lawrence had read enough versions of Faust to recognize Mephistopheles when he saw her, but he didn’t care. “Take my life, my soul, whatever it takes.”

Elsa laughed. “Oh Laurie, nothing so dramatic. I just want what’s in your left breast pocket.”

Lawrence’s bones turned to wood. His teeth clenched. What was this woman? Some archivist of shame?

“Laurie, are you telling me that you’d offer up your soul more readily than a lock of hair?”

Lawrence forced himself to remove what he had kept next to his heart for days and nights. A lock of orange-red hair bound by a silver aglet.

Elsa walked over to Lawrence and took the lock from him the way she would pluck a purse off a mannequin’s arm. She turned the hair over in her hands, smiling knowingly. “And who did this come from?”

“It always bothered me, how history goes on and on about great deeds and just forgets about the cost. The hair’s from a student of mine. He was called Pan—Adam. He was called Adam.”

“And why isn’t this attached to his scalp?”

“…He died.”

“Was Adam under your guardianship when he died?”

“…Yes. That lock is so I never forget how I failed him.”

Elsa’s hand snapped shut. “Then we have a bargain.”

A metal suitcase appeared on the bar-counter. On its lid were stenciled the words:

THE SOLUTION™

“Take it.”

Lawrence approached the suitcase warily. “What’s in here?”

“Exactly what it says on the tin,” Myles answered. “Look, friend, do we seem like we’re going to tell you more?”

“I suppose not.”

Lawrence grasped the suitcase’s handle. The cold of the metal rushed up his arm and through his veins like winter seawater. “Please,” he asked quietly, “just send me home.”

 “Your students will build nations because of you, Herbert Lawrence.” Elsa said, swirling her wand over her head. “They’ll build worlds. Just remember…”

The bar (and its occupants) dissolved, the grounds of the New Human Institute folding out around Lawrence. All that was left of the witch was her voice:

“…There’ll always be reprisal.”

⬖

Lawrence spun on his feet wildly. It was as though all the alcohol or drugs or whatever else that horrible woman had dosed him with had been sucked right out of his system.

He was awake. He was alert. He was back.

The idea terrified Lawrence for a moment. Not what his children might do if they spotted him, or even what Mary might think, but just being at the Institute again. Lawrence felt like he was there to steal a fruit from the Tree of Life. The one thought that kept Lawrence together was that it wasn’t life for himself he sought, but for the children. Always the children.

Lawrence started taking stock. He’d been deposited (he supposed) at the edge of the campus proper, before a thick wall of trees that lay between the Institute and the endless farm-fields and the highway. The sun was nearly set, rose-gilt clouds and the low, burning mountain beneath them giving way to dark wastelands pitted by adventurous early stars. Then he looked down at the suitcase still in his hand—the Solution™, as it proclaimed itself. The only material evidence of his encounter with the “witch” and her lackey, and Lawrence didn’t even know what was inside it.

That had to be corrected. Laying it on top of the long, wanton grass, Lawrence undid the catches and flung the suitcase open.

Lawrence could only describe what he found inside as The Forbidden Planet’s take on hand-grenades. Thirteen small, roughly egg-shaped silver things with raised ridges ringing their outer-surfaces. In the middle of the case was what looked like an expensive graphics calculator with a note sticky-taped to them:

Lawrence,

What you are looking at are thirteen powerful, miniature explosives, along with their programmable detonator. They’re infinitely superior to anything you’ll find on the Vantablack market, but mostly for reasons that don’t matter unless you’re digging mine-shafts in the asteroid belt. Point is, you set a time (or times, I guess) and they explode very hard.

Sincerely yours, Myles.

Lawrence tore the note apart in frustration. Bombs? What on Earth was he supposed to do with bombs? Blow the children to smithereens and spare them whatever Timothy had planned for them?

The worst part was, that didn’t seem like the worst plan in the world right then.

Lawrence was about to start weeping again when he saw green flashes in the distance, low rumbles following just behind them.

Elsewhere.

The tears came anyway. Snapping the suitcase shut again, Lawrence started making his way towards the teleporter. He prayed the boy never realised his part in what was to come.

⬖

Galahs and cockatoos screamed and fled on the night-air as Arnold Barnes flung chains of lightning over their perches. The boy wasn’t trying to hurt them. He just liked imagining Aussie birds flitting through South American jungles. Honest.

Things had been alright lately. Yeah, Bryant Cormey was wandering around the place raving about the gospel of Lawrence, but he could be ignored. He was even funny, sometimes. Sure, the older kids seemed to have decided it was time to restore some order for whatever reason, to the point of even letting Mrs Gillespie hold lessons again, but an hour of her trying to educate them wasn’t unbearable.

And yes, Mabel had mostly retreated into a bush court of impossible creatures after admitting she killed a couple hundred people and helped usher in the reign of the asylums, but she’d be fine.

Arnold blasted a low-flying rosella to Paraguay.  

She had to be.

“Enjoying yourself?”

Arnold swung around to face the new voice. Oh, how he wished it was new.

“Good evening, Elsewhere.”

The bedraggled sight of Lawrence standing there with his weird metal suitcase made Arnold burn bright. His voice crackled and shrieked with electricity. “What are you doing here? Mrs Gillespie made you go away!”  

“I know, and having thought about it, perhaps she was right to.”

“…What?”

Hearing that from Lawrence was like if his mum actually said, “Yes Arnold, you’re right. We should have ice-cream for dinner, forever,” except far less fun. About as likely to end in a heart attack, though.

“I may have done well to listen a touch more. Ask after your feelings about… certain matters.”

“Yeah,” Arnold said flatly, “like how you wanted me and Allie to make babies for you.”

Lawrence had never specifically considered pairing Myriad and Elsewhere, but he imagined they would’ve gotten around to it eventually. “Yes, that particularly.”

Arnold’s glow dimmed somewhat, enough that Lawrence could make out the veins under the boy’s skin. “What do you want, Bertie?”

Lawrence threw his hands up. “Who says I want anything?”

“You always want something.”

God, was that what the children thought? “Well, if you must ask, there is something I could use your assistance with.”

Arnold narrowed his eyes. “You don’t want to be in charge again, do you?”

Lawrence shook his head. “No, nothing like that. I don’t deserve it.” He set the suitcase down on the ground in front of him, opening it for Arnold to inspect. “I need to send these little presents out for me.”

Arnold crouched to get a better look at Lawrence’s gifts. “What are these for? A robot Easter-egg hunt?”

Lawrence let out a slight chuckle. “Do you know what Fabergé eggs are, Elsewhere?”

“I guess?”

“Same principle.”

Arnold straightened. “You promise these aren’t bad?”

“My hand to God.”

“And if I help you, you promise to leave me and Allie and David and all that alone?”

Lawrence sighed. “If that is what you and your friends wish, I will respect it.”

“…Okay.”

And so they set about their task. Lawrence would call out an address, and Arnold would zap an egg there.

“Try to put them somewhere out of the way if you can,” Lawrence suggested. “I want it to be a surprise.

Some of the addresses felt vaguely familiar to Arnold. Some of them even sounded important to his young ears.

“18 King George Terrace.”

They had about done nine eggs when the questions overwhelmed Arnold. What possible occasion did Lawrence have for sending presents? Why eggs? How were the recipients supposed to know they had even gotten anything? Who were the recipients? And did Northam not have a post-office?

“5 Adelaide Avenue.”

Arnold hesitated.

“Come on, boy!” Lawrence almost barked, “We need to get this done!”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why?”

“Why is sending people presents so important?”

“I bet you don’t ask that at Christmastime.”

“I’m serious, why? It’s weird.”

“…You wouldn’t understand.”

Arnold folded his arms. “Then I won’t help you no more.”

Lawrence twitched. He knew what he was about to do was cruel, but if Elsa Lieroinen had taught him anything, sometimes necessity trumped kindness. “Elsewhere, do you remember your young niece?”

“…You think I’d forget her?” Being an uncle still sounded unreal to Arnold. Like someone had bunged up the timestream.

“Well, for reasons of conscience, I did not report her to the DDHA. I could have… and I still could.” Lawrence steeled himself. It was a risky ploy.

To his relief, the little boy went pale, the light inside him dying. “…You wouldn’t.”

Lawrence looked at Arnold sternly. “Much as I detest the asylums, Elsewhere, it still isn’t in the best interest for an infant with your kind of power to be left unsupervised.”

Arnold protested loudly, trying to convince himself as much as the headmaster, “They won’t listen to you! They know you’re a freak now!”

Lawrence closed his eyes sagely. “Whatever the DDHA thinks of me, they’re obligated to investigate reports of ‘demi-human’ activity. And us being on the outs with each other doesn’t mean they’ll let your brother keep little Julia…”

Arnold’s first thought was to just zap the old git into the sun. But then he thought about what Mabel had said around the bonfire. About Circle’s End:

“They were just lying in the dirt. Like they were there but… weren’t.”

Could Arnold make a person… go away like that? Forever? Even someone like Lawrence? He had thought he could, when AU had stolen his mum, but even she didn’t want him to hurt the bloke.

His other thought was to just send Lawrence far away. But anywhere Arnold could think of that Lawrence stood a chance of survival was somewhere he could maybe find a phone…

Lawrence clapped his hands together. “So, shall we finish up here?”

“…Okay.”

The old man started reciting addresses again. Arnold didn’t pay much attention.

When the eggs were all gone, Lawrence put a hand on his little assistant’s shoulder. “Thank you, Elsewhere. You do not know what good you’ve done for your kind.”

Arnold didn’t answer him, instead fleeing from his touch.

He found David and Allison sitting around the ruins of a fire, chatting and consuming bags of raw marshmallows.

“…So then Snow White’s mum makes herself really ugly—”

The water-sprite was cut off by Arnold flinging himself at him and Allison, wrapping them in a tight, clinging hug.

“Arnold!” Allison cried. “What the hell!”

It dawned on the pair that Arnold was shaking. This wasn’t a happy hug.

“Arnold?” Allison asked again. “What’s the matter?”

“…I think I did something bad.”

⬖

In the bed that Therese Fletcher had occupied until recently, Mary Gillespie awoke to a knock on the cottage door, which was surprising enough. The children had become so self-sufficient lately. Still, it was what she was there for.

“Coming,” she called out, trying to keep the blurriness from her voice.

Whoever was waiting for her knocked loud and hard again before Mary had even reached the door. She had to stop for a second and count to five before she opened it.

“Did you have a nightmare, love—oh, Lawrence.”

Her old friend stood in the doorway, like a stray dog that didn’t know it wasn’t welcome. “Mary…”

Mary sighed. “Look, Laurie, I told you, we can’t—”

He threw his arms around the woman, tears dripping onto her neck. “I’m so sorry. So sorry…”

“…You are?”

A wretched, silent nod.

Mary found herself stroking Lawrence’s hair. So he got it. He finally got it. She couldn’t really complain about the timing. She’d barely realized what they were before him.

“Well, at least we will all go together…”

⬗

Most people assumed Mr. Thumps2 wasn’t very bright. But that was far from the truth. Thanks to the Physician’s strict tank-training and gene tailoring, Mr. Thumps could speak over fifty languages, was skilled in the cuisines of over a hundred countries, was qualified to perform both first-aid along with basic surgical procedures, and couldn’t count how many ways he knew to kill a man.

That is to say, Mr. Thumps knew a bomb when he saw one.

He spotted it while putting away the Valours’ laundry, tucked away in the corner of the linen closet. It sat there in the dark, the ridge around its midsection flashing faster and faster.

“Oh, dear.”

Mr. and Mrs Valour were brunching when Thumps strode down the stairs.

Mrs Valour glanced up from her french toast. “Ah, Mr. Thumps, is the laundry done?” She gestured at one of the dining table’s empty chairs. “Why don’t you join us?”

Mr. Thumps liked Valerie Valour. She was one of the few true-humans he knew who didn’t treat him or his brothers and cousins like living furniture. Which is why he proceeded to hoist her over his shoulder like a pulp gorilla.

Valerie screamed. “Thumps! What are you doing?

Her husband shot out of his chair. “The hell are you—”

Mr. Thumps threw Timothy over his back, too. “There is no time to explain.”

The two Valours kicked and clawed at their strange servant as he made his way towards the front door and out to Timothy’s black sedan, throwing them in the back seats. “We are going now.”

Before Tim and Val could do anything, Mr. Thumps was already in the driver’s seat and pulling out of the driveway.  

Timothy managed to pull himself upright, leaning in close to shout in Mr. Thumps’ ear. “I don’t know what’s got into your head, Thumps, but this—”

Behind the car, there was a boom like an entire forest falling at once. Valerie had her face pressed against the rear-window.

Their house was on fire, the second floor gone entirely, while flames gushed out of broken windows like tears from dead eyes.

Valerie turned to look at the back of Thumps’ head. “Did you know this was going to happen?”

“It was a good guess,” Thumps said colourlessly as always.

“Thank you.”

Before either her or Tim could say anything else, more explosions sounded in the distance. Towers of smoke rose around Canberra like petrified world-trees.

Not four seconds later, the Flying Man descended upon the city.

Valerie grabbed her husband’s arm.

“Timothy? What’s happening?”

The New Human Crisis had begun.

1. An obscure also-ran poet and artist of questionable peccadillos, Ralph Chubb is mostly remembered for his bizarre prophecy that the island of Albion would one day be redeemed by the boy-god Ra-el-phaos: “…a Young Boy of thirteen years old, naked perfect and unblemished.” Despite several false-starts, this has yet to occur. ↩

2. Drone #627 with family. ↩

Previous Chapter                                                                                                           Next Chapter

Chapter Fifty-One: Ulysses in Northam

Book Two: Titanomachy

Nobody at the Duke’s Inn knew what to say when Mad Laurie walked in from the night. For thirteen years, the headmaster had avoided Northam and her neighbouring towns—usually sending Mary Gillespie or one of his other minions for whatever he couldn’t have delivered directly to his school. Even his students were a more common sight in town. The man was like John the Baptist, if he had traded camel hair for a suit that looked like it had been ironed with him in it.

The few lucky pub-goers who had seen Herbert Lawrence up close almost didn’t recognize him. They remembered a polished Oxfordian fresh off the boat, not this haggard, storm-tossed old man with shredded trouser hems and red-stained derbys.

Mad Laurie darted his eyes around the crowded bar like a beaten dog. A tide of murmurs and shouting rose from the Northamites:

“Oi, Laurie, where you been?”

“I thought he was dead…”

“Is Mary with ya?”

Lawrence ignored them, making his way towards the counter. A few old men at the pool table set down their cues as he passed.

“Christ alive, Laurie, haven’t seen you since ‘58. Why didn’t you come out and say hello at the barbecue?”   

The idea of these people traipsing about his Institute almost made Lawrence wince. Cainites pillaging the Garden. “I was… under the weather.”

A bald, gnomish fellow with sunburnt ears had turned away from his game of darts. “Me missus went up to your school just this morning with some pies for ya kids. Said your lights got turned off…”

The man still had his dart raised behind his head. Duke’s Inn still kept the tips good and keen, Lawrence couldn’t help but notice. “Mix up with the utility company,” he answered. “It’ll be sorted post-haste.”

The man with the burnt ears shrugged and made his throw, poorly. “Bloody idiots.”

“Indeed.”

As the cheers and greetings lowered, Lawrence detected an undertow of whispers. Gossip. Pure slander… out of context. He was glad when he made it to the bar.

A handsome-boned woman with red, cape-like braids sat nursing a glass of something green and bitter smelling. She smiled up at the headmaster. “Fancy a drink, Doctor Lawrence?”

Hungarian? Lawrence thought to himself. Has Northam become cosmopolitan while I wasn’t looking? “No thank you, ma’am.”

The woman waved him off. “Later, then.”

The landlord of Duke’s Inn was one of those men who aged terribly until their forties, at which point they entered a kind of homeostasis till the day they died. He shook Lawrence’s hand like he wanted a new beer-tap. “Laurie!”

Lawrence let his arm be jerked around like he were a ragdoll. “Good evening, Pierce.”

“Aww, come on now, Lawrence, it’s Pie-man.”

Lawrence hoped he wouldn’t have to learn the origins of that nickname again1. “Quite.”

Pie-Man smiled. In private, Lawrence had said it made the landlord look like a gargoyle. Mary had laughed.

“Well, they repel evil, don’t they?”

He looked at the suitcases in Lawrence’s hands. “Need a room?”

Lawrence nodded. “Yes, if you could oblige.”

A chuckle. “Just like old times, innit?”

Lawrence forced a smile. When he, Mary, and their students returned to Australia to set up the Institute, they’d lodged in Duke’s Inn for nearly half a year. Even after that, they sometimes had to house children there while the dorms were being built. The old man supposed that had been kind of Pie-Man. “That it is.”

“Tell ya what, how about I have Jen carry your bags up while we have a pint.”

Lawrence glanced behind himself. More and more people were glaring at him, their eyes a constellation of black holes. “Ah, no thank you… Pie-Man.” He gestured down at his travel-tortured suit. “As you can see, I could rather use a shower.”

Pie-Man nodded slightly. He looked disappointed. “Fair enough, mate.”

His red-faced wife led Lawrence to “the nice room”—meaning it had an en-suite bathroom that had been cleaned sometime in the last calendar year, along with a desk designed for a primary-schooler with gigantism. Aside from a few hundred guests worth of hair and skin flakes nestled in the corners, the room’s only egregious blemish was a patch of scarred, bubbled plaster next to the door.

“I think your Hugo leaned against the wall there,” Mrs Pie-Man said wistfully. She rested a liver spotted hand on Lawrence’s shoulder. “We’re all sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

Thankfully, she left Lawrence to make himself at home. He locked the door behind her.

Hot water, for the first time in days. The shower washed away what felt like the dust and sweat of a decade, and Lawrence felt able to relax his shoulders for a moment. Donning the complimentary, threadbare bathrobe, he went and inspected the contents of his twin samsonites.

Mary had been thorough. Three changes of clothes, toiletries, and nearly two hundred pounds in cash. For all Lawrence knew, that money might now be all his assets in the world. Did Valour have his accounts frozen? Did he dare check?

What Lawrence was surprised to find was a black leather book, half filled with his neat, crisp handwriting. The latest volume of his diaries. Lawrence had been keeping it since the end of the war, free at last from the danger of Nazi bullets.  Now over twenty volumes, it constituted a meticulous account of life at the New Human Institute; from beginning to end, so it seemed. Lawrence had even left instructions in his will for them to be published after his death, when the world was hopefully open-minded enough to view them in context.

He imagined this unfinished epilogue would wind up the only surviving fragment. The children no doubt were using its older brothers for kindling. Or lavatory paper2
. Sighing softly, he opened the diary to the last entry:

November 16th, 1965

Żywie did what she could for Adam Sinclair. May he forgive us.

Lawrence turned the page immediately, fleeing to a safe wasteland of yellow writing paper. He wouldn’t let this be history’s last glimpse of his efforts. Of his new humans. Fishing the velvet case holding his fine silver graduation pens out of his suitcase, he sat down and started writing:

In in the sunset of my life’s work, I find myself harbouring doubt. I should consider this a sign my mind is still sound—true certainty is the domain of fanatics and madmen—but it is a cold comfort indeed. I had always considered posthuman abilities an unalloyed good: the kind of wonder seldom seen outside of dreams. My students’ mere presence at my school transformed it into a chimera of the wondrous and the everyday.

But then again, was not the chimera a monster?

Myriad keeps returning to my thoughts. That brilliant, uncanny girl, to whom my years of education and training were as simple as birdsong. She was a wonder. The very future of thought itself.

Or so I thought.

I think back to my school days. Did the labour of mastering words, numbers, and the human mind not help make me the man I am today? As I think about Myriad’s almost feral degeneration, I wonder if her powers robbed her of the ability to grow up?

But then, all races have their deviants and cripples. Perhaps Myriad is one such unfortunate. Then there’s Maelstrom. Poor, sweet Maelstrom. I always knew his mother was something of a lost cause. Melusine would always bear the scars of her wild childhood. But Maelstrom, Maelstrom was perfect. My prize orchard. The Adam Deucalion of the race to come.

Until a strange child woke up in his body. I can’t help but ask myself how close that new boy was to the surface? I tried telling myself it was Myriad’s doing. That she was his Lilith, or Pandora. But then it spread to the other children. Children I had saved from deprivation, imprisonment, and worse! Now they drive me from the home I gave them!

Mankind is a clumsy, blunt-toothed monkey. It was fragility that forced us to master fire and forge tools from a harsh world. To come together and make communities out of strangers. The children know nothing of fragility. Of raw, painful need. Was my stirpiculture breeding what was left of it out of them?

I can picture their descendants, a thousand years hence. Naked and mute, creating Eden as wordless want stirs within them, the way crows build nests and ants dig hives. Golden and godlike, freer than the freest man, but never thinking to look up and consider the sun and stars, enjoying only the ecstasy of beasts.

Part of me revolts at the image. Another, almost desires it.

No. I am thinking like the people downstairs. The people who would call the DDHA if their neighbour beat them at cards. The people who fear change. No revolution is easy to live through, and evolution is always gradual. I must keep heart. I must not abandon the children, no matter how much they wish I would.

If I was sensible, I would be far away. Timothy and his jackboots will come for me eventually. Who knows when some drunk Northamite will see fit to whip up a mob to drive out the ‘mad scientist’? But I am a man of reason, or have tried to be, at least. When they drag me before a judge or throw me into the darkness, I will explain myself. And damn whatever they think of me.

Lawrence set his pen down. A levy had burst within him, weariness drowning his bones once more. Without bothering to turn off the light, he fell backwards on top of his room’s starched, neatly made bed.

As his waking mind flickered out, countless thoughts stirred blearily. How long he had as a free man. How Mary would cope by herself. Would Timothy shackle her, too?

…Wait, what was a lady doing in the pub?

⬗

Lawrence spent as little of his days at Duke’s Inn as he could. Staying in one place too long made him nervous, while Pie-Man and his wife kept trying to rope him into dinner or pub trivia. He mostly haunted Northam’s cafes and restaurants, trickling away his money on endless cups of coffee while working on his diary, trying to reconstruct his world in its pages.    

Then he started seeing his students.

It was quick glimpses at first. Windshear and Growltiger playing in the park, or Linus out busking. Lawrence didn’t dare approach them.

Not content with banishing me, now they invade my exile. Still I worry. Do they realize how quickly human hearts turn?

As the week passed, these encounters became terrifying close. Haunt would rise from the concrete just a few paces ahead of Lawrence. Once, he fled from the doorstep of his favoured coffee lair when he spotted Reverb and Stratogale fawning over some local teen’s engagement ring in the window.

Far too young.  

Then, one morning, he saw Maelstrom.

The boy was with his mother, fidgeting in shorts and a t-shirt like he was decked out in his Sunday best. Britomart was walking alongside him, holding his hand.

Lawrence couldn’t resist. He followed them at a distance, hiding among clusters of other pedestrians as much as possible, sometimes even ducking into stores or alleys just to avoid being spotted.

Eventually, the three and their shadow arrived at Capitol Theatres. As the new humans strolled inside, Lawrence pulled out his wallet. He was going to the pictures.

⬖

David and Louise Michelson sat together in the darkened theatre, shovelling popcorn into their mouths till their lips chapped, watching Snow White duet with her own echo3

“I’m wishing…”

Louise was transfixed. She’d never seen anything like it. It was as if Mabel had managed to pull a whole world through.

“I’m wishing…”

Her thoughts far away from her body, Louise’s aura pulsed softly, raising the ire of the family sitting in the row behind them.

“Put out the bleedin’ light!”

Louise scowled, the white glow dimming and dying.

“Damn demis come in and think they own the place.”

She muttered under her breath, “Gits.”

David found himself squeezing the girl’s hand. “Ignore them,” he whispered, “they’re just jealous.”

“The nice things…”

Louise smiled back at him. For some reason, it was taking her effort to keep her aura quiet. “You think so?”

“The nice things…”

David shrugged. “They should be.”

“…He’ll say.”

Louise pecked him playfully on the cheek. “Suck-up.”

The boy rubbed the kiss like it was a bruise. David hadn’t felt this queasy since his eyes changed. He almost wondered if they had gone blue again.

Oh, God, he thought. Linus was right.

David hadn’t thought much about inviting Louise to the movies. He thought it might cheer her up after she’d dredged up all those memories around the bonfire. He had asked Mabel, too, but she declined. Since that night, she seemed to prefer the company of fiction to flesh and blood. Or ice.

Then David had to go and mention it to Linus…

The older boy had grinned rakishly. “Ah, so it’s a date.”

“It’s not a date!” David protested. “I’m just going to the movies.”

“With a girl.”

“A girl’s who’s my friend.”

“Is your mum watchin’ it with ya?”

“…No,” he mumbled, “she’s going to the hairdressers4.”

“Then it’s a date.” He wrapped an arm around the water-sprite. “Here, I’ll give you some tips.”

It probably should have occurred to David how little experience Linus had with dating outside of bizarre forced mating schemes, but the young man’s sheer bigness eclipsed all that.

Snow White was now running through the woods, speeded on by the huntsman’s desperate warning, while malevolent, gnarled trees snatched at her dress.

“Okay, at some point you yawn and put your arm around her shoulder. Works really well if you pick a scary part. Makes you look all brave and protective all at once.”

Out the corner of his eye, David studied Louise’s face. She didn’t look particularly frightened, but a girl their age down the row was pressing her face into her mother’s sleeve, so he guessed it counted. He forced a yawn and flopped his arm down behind Louise’s neck, craning his head to try and gauge her reaction.

She snorted, laughing. “Dork.”

David found himself laughing, too.

Far in the back row, an old man was watching the children’s shadows, writing in his diary by the dancing, inconstant light of the projector. He was still sore about the cheek he’d gotten at the box office:

“One ticket for Snow White, please.”

The pothole faced concession boy regarded Lawrence like he was a leper. “Don’t have any grandkids, mate?”

Lawrence frowned. “One can appreciate art at any age, young man.”

I don’t see why Maelstrom took such issue with our stirpiculture. Even at this young age, I see him court and seduce. I am surprised he did not bring Myriad or Phantasmagoria. I can’t say part of me isn’t pleased, however. Phantasmagoria’s power is glorious, but I always worried about the influence she had on Maelstrom, and Myriad has turned out to be more Lilith than Eve.

The children are flicking popcorn at the screen now, the shadows arcing through the projector beam like dark comets. I thought I’d brought them up better. God, it’s a ghastly film. Say what you want about Sleeping Beauty, at least Walt Disney’s men learned how to draw humans by 19505. And why does Snow White look so young? A paradox of the modern age. Pregnancy—something impermanent by its very nature—we treat as some shuddering horror until a person’s life is a quarter done. Unless they’re married, of course. Just look at the girl in the cafe.

Peculiarly, the subject of breeding leads my thoughts back to superheroes. I always considered them and the supervillains the result of the pressures rootstock humanity puts on posthumans, but perhaps that was arrogant of me. The public clashes and test of strength, the bravado, the costumes as gaudy as a peacock’s tail. What if all that wasn’t a role society forced upon them, or a release valve? What if it was a mating display?

All creatures seek strong young. Man and superman are no exception. Perhaps I  fretted too much about stirpiculture. Perhaps, even now, the seeds I have sown will rise and reach for the sun. Perhaps, perhaps…

Eventually, the wicked queen—beauty lost—tumbled off the cliff. Her poisoned stepdaughter was woken by her prince, and all was good in the world. The theatre lights slowly woke back up.

Lawrence watched his students rise from their seats, an hour and twenty minutes worth of pent up energy twitching in their limbs. Louise ran out immediately, giggling like she expected to be chased.

Maelstrom however, lingered, looking right up at the back row. His eyes found Lawrence’s, turned milky-white.

Lawrence screwed his eyes shut, digging his fingernails into the armrests. Oh, God.

Something warm and wet splattered against his forehead. When Lawrence opened his eyes again, a globule of spit was dripping down his nose, a boy’s laughter fleeing at speed.

An ugly, angry scrawl, the only alternative to a scream.

Ungrateful little brat!

⬗

The end started that very night. Lawrence was holed up in his rented room, writing. Regrettably, he also had more than a few drinks in him, very deliberately not imbibed at the Duke’s Inn.

He scratched and slashed at the page like he was carving meat from a beast, sometimes forgetting spaces between words, his free hand shaking at his side.

Never expect recognition. Never expect appreciation, or even kindness. Schoolmasters are hated decades after their deaths for having the gall to drag their students inside and teach them how to get along in the world. They will resent you forever for not letting them drink lye or play on the edge of cliffs.

Blast them all! Let them waste their talents on this pimple of a town. Let them dance among wolves and dragons! Timothy can have them! I’m not—  

There was a loud, insistent knock on the door. Growling, Lawrence slammed down his pen and stalked over to silence it.

Pie-Man was waiting on the other side. His knobbled, perpetually middle-aged features were set uncharacteristically grim. “Hello, Lawrence.”

Lawrence was in too deep a sulk to pick up on the landlord’s tone. “What do you want, Pierce? I told you I’m not interested in binge-drinking with you.”

“We need to talk.”

“Do we? I recall paying you for the week.”

Lawrence tried closing the door, but Pie-Man stopped it with a hand. “It’s not about your money.”

Through the alcoholic haze, Lawrence finally saw the look in Pierce’s eyes. Hard, but with a glimmer that could have been the beginning of tears.

Lawrence smiled a tispy, joyless grin. “Good God, you must be the last man in Northam to hear about it.” He brought his face in close to Pie-Man’s. “Who told you about my stirpiculture?”

Pierce shook his head in confusion. “The hell are you on about?”

A laugh like wind through a broken flue. “The babies, of course! Who finally had the guts to let you in on the big secret?”

Pierce stepped fully into the room, slamming the door shut behind him. “The boys who helped your kids see off the supervillains.” He turned and glared at Lawrence. “Goddamnit, Laurie, what are you, a Nazi?”

Another weak laugh. “The ungrateful little bastards. Should’ve had Żywie put the Taylor lad’s blood back where she found it. Tell me, ‘Pie-Man’,” he jeered the nickname, “did Żywie pass through your fine establishment with my children?”

Pierce grabbed the headmaster by the collar, shoving him against a wall. “How can you stand here and laugh? You were… those poor girls, I don’t even know the word for what you were doing!”

“Eugenics, I believe your sort would call it.”

“Shut the fuck up! You think you’re so much better than us—so bloody wise and educated—and you were breeding little girls like cattle! And we just let you do it! All those years, and we never bothered to check in, or visit, or—we didn’t care.” Pie-Man started to weep. “And people know now. People know, and they’re still letting you walk around and selling you food.” He growled. “I should’ve turned you out. People like you, they should go live in bloody caves. Just clear off and top themselves!”

“Because of me,” Lawrence said quietly, “there are children in this world who can show you the face of God. What’s your legacy, Pierce? Three bakers and some housewife in Port Jackson?”

Pierce punched the old man square in the jaw, sending him to the dirty carpet.

Lawrence looked up at the landlord, blood trickling from his nose. “So what happens now, big man?”

“We’re going to the police station.”

“If the good Constable Preston wishes to speak to me, he can come and get me. I mean, he was the one slacking on the job, wasn’t he?”

Pie-Man reared his foot back for kick, and… it stayed there. Pierce held the pose as if he had just then turned to stone. He didn’t even blink.

What is this fool doing? Lawrence asked himself. Building suspense?

A minute passed. Pie-Man didn’t move. Lawrence got to his feet, slowly circling his aggressor. The man remained still. It became quickly apparent to Lawrence that he wasn’t even breathing.

He tried touching Pie-Man’s cheek, but recoiled instantly from his skin. It was like he’d struck a moving fan, or a live wire. The jolt also caused Lawrence to glance out the window:

A bird, wings caught mid-beat, hovering impossibly in the night air.

It was a new human. It had to be. But none of his students could play with time—  

The door opened again. A woman in a green dress and long thick braids walked in like she owned the world. The woman at the bar.

“Who—”  

“Hello, Dr. Lawrence,” she said, smiling like it was the driest thing ever said. “Elsa Lieroinen. We have a lot to talk about.”

1. An eating contest victory over Ralph Rivers himself. He was visiting the Finch family at the time. ↩

2. In fact, Lawrence’s diaries mostly lay ignored by his students, much to the delight of the cult and cape researchers the New Human Institute inspired. ↩

3. The showing was technically illegal, but the Walt Disney Corporation had yet to place agents in every small town. ↩

4. Most of Mrs Taylor’s work would of course be undone the next time Françoise changed states, but it was a ritual of womanhood. ↩

5. In his heart of hearts, Lawrence did have to admit the Evil Queen looked quite good. Very Joan Crawford. ↩

Previous Chapter                                                                                                           Next Chapter

Chapter Fifty: Nostos

Book Two: Titanomachy

Dr. Stephen Carter missed Allison Kinsey. The journeyman scientist and the little super may never have brought each other any joy, but they knew where they stood with each other. He would make her do something pointless for reasons neither understood, and they basked in the shared misery until he went home for the evening.

It was awful, yes, but it was still better than trying to get anything besides thunderbolts and flaming beams of light out of McClare’s oldest inmate. Yet here they were.

Dr. Carter looked across the metal table at the young woman. She was beautiful, certainly, even under the glaring, overexposing fluorescent light of the interview room. Her cheekbones reminded Carter of those great, severe eagles the Americans were so fond of. They framed eyes like storm clouds at midnight. As per McClare dictate, her dark hair was shorn nearly to the scalp.

“You know,” he said, “I always imagined Helen of Troy would be blonde.”

She frowned. “One could mistake the sun for the gold, I imagine. I’ve told you, Carter, it’s Helen of Sparta. I haven’t been ‘of Troy’ for a long time.”

“Sorry, sorry… hey, if you’re Greek, why do you sound so, well, Scottish?”

“Because I learned English from Scotsmen, cleverman,” she answered flatly.

Helen of Wherever1 had been held at McClare since it opened. From what Carter had been able to garner from the few staff who’d been there longer than him, she’d been arrested a little after the Cuban Crisis for melting a police car at a Vietnam protest. She’d put up no struggle. Since then, she had resided in the same cell, telling anyone who asked she was a character from the Iliad and frying alive anyone who objected. She brooked no experiments, and had no fear of punishment. Early on—so the story went—the head of the asylum had withheld all food and drink till she cooperated.

He gave up after nine months.

At McClare, if you had nothing better to do but needed to justify your paycheck, you went and talked to Helen on the off chance she spilled the beans on whatever her secret origin was.

The greying scientist yawned and folded his hands behind his neck. “Okay—”

“I know you don’t believe me,” Helen interrupted. “None of your sort do. Even when you pray to me that your babies will be beautiful.”    

Dr. Carter looked at her, his head tilted. “People do that?”

She quirked her shoulders. “A couple of the nurses.” She leant forward. “I hear them.”

Stephen tried shaking the thought from his mind. “Alright. I don’t believe you.”

Lightning flickered in Helen’s eyes. “But maybe you can convince me,” the doctor hastily added.  “Right now, in this room.”

The chancy glow subsided. “You think so?”

“Sure. Tell me, what’s it like being part god?”

“Not part. Would I be sitting here talking to you if any part of me could die?”

Carter raised an eyebrow, regarding the shackles that bound Helen’s hands. “I thought you were—what’s the word?” He clicked his fingers. “A demigoddess? Your mum was that queen, right?”

Helen sighed. “You’re thinking of Leda. And she was my mother, in all the ways that really matter. That’s probably where the confusion came from. But she was my mother only in name, not by birth.”

“Then who was your mother?”

Through the swamp of lingering arguments with his wife, through the upcoming birthdays and open days, an image rose to the top of Dr. Carter’s mind like a message in a bottle. A woman. A goddess, Carter knew as soon as he questioned it. Taller than a man, with hair like fire, and eyes like smoke. One hand held a dagger, the other balanced scales. She was as real as a dream in the moments before you opened your eyes.

“Nemesis is a proud goddess, Dr. Carter. Proud and beautiful. My father coveted both. Her beauty, for the same reasons all men do. Her pride, so he could conquer it”         

“What are you—”  

A silver fish speeding over dark waves in a loud-roaring sea. Snakes and scorpions crawling across the dry Earth. A goose in a storm tossed sky, fighting an eagle.

“My father got what he wanted. He always did.”

The goddess, blood streaking down her thighs, weeping alone in a copse of trees.

“Oh, God.”

“I’m sorry for that. But you must understand why she did what she did.”

Two eggs, lying in the grass. A herdsman presenting a fine wooden box to a woman in still finer clothes.

“My mother I imagine couldn’t bear the thought of me and my brother growing inside her. She existed to punish hubris, to tarry the scales. And what were we but a hubris she could never avenge? So, she exposed us, leaving our futures to the Fates.”

Stephen swallowed. An image was lurking just behind his eyes, like the shadow of a whale beneath the sea. A school, or something that looked like a school, far away.

No, it was nothing like that. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Helen smiled sadly. “You can’t judge us by mortal standards, Dr. Carter. We’re not people. We’re spells cast on the world to give it shape. My father did these things, yes, but he also punished tyrants and protected travellers. Bushfires coax seeds from their shells, don’t they?”

Dr. Carter didn’t know what to say to that. “What happened next?”

“Pollux and I hatched in Sparta, in the halls of King Tyndareus. He took us in, reared us up beside his own son and daughter.”

“Gotta say, that probably wouldn’t have been my first idea.”

“Gods are like cuckoo birds, Stephen. We don’t take kindly to those who turn out our byblows. And divine blood is an asset. It can strain gold from your line, or be traded for the same.”

“So you and your… were you ‘twins’ if you were eggs?”

To Stephen’s surprise, Helen laughed. “No one gave us a glossary, but the word works well enough.”

“So you two were gods.”

“Yes.”

“But your family weren’t.”

Helen looked down between her bound hands, faint steel eyes glinting back up at her. “Some of our brothers and sisters, they grow up in glades and grottos a mortal man couldn’t find if Father Zeus was holding their hand. Death and pain are just stories to them: little barbarisms their mothers tell them about so they know how good they have it.”

“Not me and Pollux, though. From birth, we were drowned in human frailty. Whooping babies, old nobles with faces like melted candles, haggard slaves—”

“You had slaves?”

“…Yes, we had slaves. We also sometimes ran people out of town for being ugly, exposed children who weren’t immortal, and hardly any of us could read, just to get those out of the way. May I continue?”

Dr. Carter nodded.

“Good. As I was saying, we were surrounded by suffering. But it never seemed quite real to us. Like a game. I think I was four before I realized clumsiness wasn’t an affection, or that the sound people made when they hit their toe wasn’t kin to laughter. I don’t think our foster parents quite knew what to make of us, either.”


“…You said you hatched from an egg.”

“That didn’t stop generations of your kind from calling us mere demigods, and Mother and Father didn’t try bleeding us to check. I remember this one day. It was summer, and Pollux and I had gone swimming in the river. We were scraping away at the mud at the bottom when we saw a couple guards diving in above us. They dragged us out kicking and screaming,”—a smile—“flashing and burning. Turned out we had been under for over fifteen minutes. It must sound strange to you, but all that fuss was terribly confusing for us.”

Dr. Carter shrugged. “Sounds like children, to me.”

“Do you have children, Stephen?”

Carter was taken back by the question, but he answered honestly. “Yes, actually. A daughter. Rachel.”

“Tell me about her?”

To his surprise, he did.

🗲

As the weeks passed, Dr. Carter’s sessions with Helen of Wherever became more and more bearable. She would feed him some petty details about her powers to pretty up the reports, and he got to skive off for most of his workday.

Other than that, they mostly just talked.

“How did you meet your wife, Dr. Carter?”

“Oh, it wasn’t anything special. Pam moved to my school in year 12, we went to a few mixers…” The scientist scratched the back of his neck. “I’m not sure when we got serious, but suddenly she was helping me through university and… well, what else was I supposed to do?”

Helen didn’t answer. She was staring right past the scientist’s head.

Dr. Carter clicked his fingers. “Helen? You there?”

She shook her head. “Sorry, nostalgia got me. Sometimes you moderns still sound so foreign when you talk about marriage.”

“I suppose yours was arranged?”

“Yes and no.”

“…I’m just not allowed to be right, am I?”

“No you are not. Do you remember my brother Pollux?”

“Yeah. You sounded close… oh, God, you weren’t married, were you?”

“I wish I could act like that was a completely stupid question, but no, we were not. As for us being close, we got on well enough. Our mortal brother Castor, though, he was the one Pollux really loved.” She smiled. “The Dioscuri, people called them, or the Gemini.”

“Wait, that—”

“Yes, Stephen, that Gemini. You’d think growing up in the company of gods—even ones as small and petty as me and Pollux were—would’ve stunted a boy like a flower in the shadow of a great tree. But Pollux wasn’t like that. His divinity didn’t cast a shadow over anyone. Only light. Or maybe Castor loved him too much for that to matter.”

To Dr. Carter’s ears, they sounded exactly like the kind of sibling duos that made his life hell in school. “They get up to much?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe. I remember once, when Theseus and his mate abducted me—”

“Wait, you got kidnapped by Theseus? The bloke who fought the Minotaur?”

Helen waved her hand. “This was years after that. He and… Pirithous I think it was were looking for new, divine wives. I was Theseus’ choice. I was also ten.”

“Christ.”

“Oh, it wasn’t as bad as all that. All it meant was that my brothers had plenty of time to come get me. We took Theseus’ mother with us as my handmaid. Aethra. Sweet thing, a bit thick.”

Stephen chuckled. “Is that some old Greek code of honour? You take our sister, we take your mum?”

“Not really. I just needed a new handmaiden. I hear after they lost me they tried stealing away Persephone. You can probably guess how that turned out for them.”

“Should I?”

“Her husband is the king of hell.”

“Oh. To be fair, I can’t imagine that was ever anyone’s normal.”

Helen sighed, turning away from Dr. Carter as best she could in her chains. “I never said it was. My actual wedding hardly was, either.”

Carter was no great reader of people, but he knew when a tangent was a sanctuary. “You still want to talk about it?”

“Yes, I do.” She took a deep breath. Dr. Carter wondered if breathing was just something she did not to freak people like him out.

“Castor and Pollux disappeared when I was sixteen. Some cattle raid in retaliation for a cattle raid in retaliation for I can’t even remember what anymore. They set off one morning. Days became weeks, weeks become months, and months became forever.”

“They died?”

“Castor must’ve. Pollux… I think he just couldn’t bring himself to come back without him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“English is strange. Always making you apologise for things you didn’t do. I just hope they’re together, somewhere.”

“How’d your father cope?”

“He wept. And then he went groom hunting for me.”

“Am I allowed to say that wouldn’t have been my priority?”

“You may, though I might say you wouldn’t have made much of a king. My father had lost both his heirs. His kingdom was one death away from dissolution.”

“Didn’t he have you?”

“I’m a woman, Dr. Carter. Our thrones weren’t like yours. They never would have tolerated your queen reigning alone, over even her own husband. The best me and my sister could hope for was to be conduits for our father’s blood and legacy—to be bartered away for a new son.”

“But you’re a goddess!”

Dr. Carter suddenly went very quiet.

Helen grinned slyly. “Ah, so you admit it.”

“I mean, so you say.”

“Close enough. Either way, being a goddess means very little outside a temple. Our palaces were littered with nymphs and small goddesses, thrown to mortal princes like meat to dogs by indulgent fathers. Rotting on the vine for eternity.”

For some reason, Stephen found himself recalling the time Allison Kinsey listed all the bones in the human body, and the man who could answer any question posed in exactly one hundred words. “Seems… wasteful.”

Helen shrugged. “Divine loins never falter.”

“…Forget I said anything.”

“Very wise. They came from all over, my suitors: Mycenae, Argos—and those names mean nothing to you, do they?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I need to stop assuming everyone is familiar with my sliver of the world. Are you a churchgoing man, Stephen?”

“I guess?”

“Then maybe you’ll have a beginning of an idea of what it was like in my father’s hall that night. That holy scent of incense embracing the blood of beasts and the sweat of throngs of men.”

Dr. Carter tilted his hand. “Two out of three.”

“I remember sitting behind the screen, watching the shadows argue their right to me. To my right was my sister, Clytemnestra.” She looked at Dr. Carter expectantly, before shaking her head and muttering something in Greek. “Poor Clytemnestra. If I had hatched anywhere else, she might have been our father’s jewel. If she had been born some other time, she might even have been allowed to be a person. At the very least, we’d all have learned what she was capable of.”

“Penelope was with us, too, trying to comfort me.” Helen studied Carter’s face, searching in vain for a sign of recognition. “You really don’t know who Penelope is?”

“Afraid not.”

“Teach the masses to read and this is what they give you.”

“Weren’t you just saying it was alright I didn’t know Greek geography?”

“Do you know what the word ‘mentor’ means?”

“Yes.”

“I rest my case. I watched their silhouettes through the screen, like a shadow-play. The men had their hands at their swords, all shouting at my father why they ought to be allowed to rut with the cygnet of Zeus.” The goddess flew into a series of impressions of long dead men. To Carter’s ear, she sounded surprisingly authentic.  

“My coffers are the envy of the Rich One himself!”

“Look at how Father Zeus has blessed me with great size!”

“I fought alongside Heracles himself!”

Helen shot Carter a flat glance. “That last one had to be at least seventy. Not sure if he was better or worse than the seven year old.”

“You really think they were going to kill each other over a woman?”

“My, aren’t we civilized? They weren’t just competing for my hand, they were fighting for all my father’s lands and wealth. I was just the ribbon around the box. And back then, the Greeks were only one people in the sense we thought everyone else was worse. If anything, that started to change that very night, but that’s another story.”

“So how’d you get it sorted?”

“There was one man there who wasn’t interested in me, or even in Sparta. He’d arrived weeks before any of the other suitors, and had been pestering my cousin all that time. I hadn’t thought much of him—some podunk island prince with too-short legs—but Penelope seemed taken with him.” She smiled again. “He was called Odysseus, and his name meant trouble.”

“Oh, him!” exclaimed Dr. Carter.

“Indeed. His idea was simple. There would be no more debate, no more wheedling, no more gifts. I would decide who I would marry, right there, in front of everyone.” Helen laughed. “Radical concept. Do you see why they called Odysseus the wiliest of the Greeks?”

“Christ, how do you make that kind of choice on the spot?”

“Easily. I said ‘Menelaus’ before Odysseus’ words had stopped echoing.”

“Why him?”

“Because he was a redhead. The fact his elder brother held all his family’s lands didn’t hurt, either.” Helen steepled her fingers. “So, anything good on TV out there?”

Dr. Carter knew not to press.

🗲

It was some time before Helen discussed her youth again. What stories she did share were from much later. She rarely mentioned dates, so Dr. Carter learned to pay attention to the names of monarchs and other context clues. Mostly were surprisingly dull—long anecdotes of daily life through the ages, or wars Dr. Carter didn’t remember the names of.   

“Did you know any famous people who weren’t Greek?”

“Stephen, if you ever become immortal, I’m sure you’ll spend days hovering around celebrities in case you need to entertain a deputy-assistant-minion in a concentration camp. I on the other hand had a life to attend to.”   

Things improved greatly when Carter started sneaking in booze.

“Here ya go.” He slid a bottle of Swan Draught across the table, before remembering the handcuffs. “Oh, sorry. Maybe we could—”

Helen’s finger sparked, and the left handcuff chain snapped. She took a swig of her beer.

“Nice trick.”

The next big step in Carter and Helen’s growing friendship was the discovery of a copy of The Greek Myths for her to fact check:

“Dionysus was actually Persephone and Father Zeus’ boy, they just regrew him inside that mortal lady. You’d think him being a god and all would be a clue…”

“Medea didn’t kill her boys, it was the peasants. Always blaming the woman…”

“ ‘Fully-formed from Zeus’ head’? Only when Hera’s in earshot. Just ask Triton.”

Stephen grinned crookedly. “Look, lying to your missus is a vital skill. Just look at this bloke.” He flicked through the book, muttering silently to himself as searched for his example. “He’s gone for ten years, and soon as he gets back, his wife stabs him in the bloody bath!” He laughed. “Should’ve just stayed in Troy with Cassandra.”

Helen did not laugh. “That was my brother-in-law.”

Dr. Carter went red. “I’m sorry, Helen. If I’d remembered…”  He chuckled nervously. “All these foreign names, you know.”

“Agamemnon. My father gave Clytemnestra to him when I married his brother. ‘Strengthen our kinship’ he said.” She frowned. “Agamemnon was always a sore loser.”

“I don’t want to speak ill of your family, Helen, but you have to feel sorry for the guy.”

“I don’t. I feel sorry for my sister, for my nieces and nephew, even that poor madwoman he dragged home, but never him.” Helen bored into the scientist with those dark, eagle eyes of hers. “Doctor, have you ever been unfaithful? With Pamela, I mean.”

Dr. Carter sputtered, before trying and failing to match the lady’s glare. “What kind of question is that?”

“Have you?”

“…Once or twice.” Why was he being honest? Why did she have to use Pam’s name? “You have to understand, it wasn’t an ongoing thing. Just a couple of spills back in uni. And once… we were having a dry-spell, alright? She didn’t—what she doesn’t know won’t hurt—isn’t hurting her.”                  

Helen nodded. “Discreet. Good. Menelaus was like that too, when he took a slave or a handmaiden to bed. I always knew, but he didn’t rub it in my face, you know?”

“Helen, I didn’t—”

“I just wish my infidelity could’ve been so quiet.”

Stephen knew when to be quiet.

“My father died a year after the wedding. Heartbreak, I think.” She shook her head. “God, he loved my brothers. Menelaus took to kinging well enough. He was a prince, after all. His big problem was that he didn’t know the lay of the land, but then, he had me.”

“Power behind the throne?”

“I wouldn’t go that far, but you could say I was his map. Honestly, it was something of a relief having him around to do the ruling. Even at that age, mortals still confused me.”

“So you were happy?”

“As much as I could ask to be. For a girl in my place and time, the choice I’d been given was rarer than gold. I knew enough of the world to know I’d gotten lucky. Maybe not as lucky as Penelope, but definitely luckier than Clytemnestra. And Menelaus… Menelaus was kind. He sought out my company more than most kings would their wives. He listened to me. He was a good man.”

“You said he cheated on you. With slaves.”

Helen put her free hand to her temples. “It was the time. I was with child as soon as you could look for for it.”

“And how old were you again?”

Helen sighed knowingly. “Sixteen.”

“And Menelaus?”

“Twenty-five, I’d guess.”

Dr. Carter suppressed a shudder.

Helen ignored him. “I knew before anyone else. How could I not? A part of me was suddenly vulnerable.” She sighed. “I knew it’d be mortal. They almost always are with your kind.”

“I wonder about that sometimes. Almost seems counterintuitive to me. You’d think god genes or whatever could beat up ours.”

“Godhead—our godhead, at least—is like diamond. Harder than anything human, but brittle. Mortality can shatter it like nothing else. The moment I lay eyes on my daughter, I knew I’d outlive her.”

“I couldn’t imagine.”

“No, you couldn’t. Still, I had her for the moment. And she was good. And yet… as the years went on, I kept thinking back to my betrothal. I was a goddess. Something eternal—a part of the world. And I let a room full of men make me pick one of them to shackle myself to, all so they could call themselves king for a few decades before shuffling off into the shadows. It—it just stopped making sense to me.”

“How’d you cope?”

“Same way all women do. I kept it to myself. Until Paris came along.”

“The Trojan bloke?”

“Yes. ‘The Trojan bloke.’ ”

“How’d you meet him?”

“A diplomatic mission from the east. Paris was young. An exiled prince come home again. Of course, his family sent him abroad as soon as they could, but I’m not sure he ever thought about it like that. All the men at court scoffed at him. An effete eastener they called him, poisoned by comfort and the riches they envied2. And he was an archer to boot.”

“What wrong with archery?” Stephen didn’t mention taking archery in high-school.

A wicked grin. “A real man kills up close, Dr. Carter. With his own hands. Unless you were my cousin-in-law. Still, I couldn’t keep my eyes off Paris. The man smelt of sandalwood, all day long. He joked like Thalia was his mother, and he looked like Apollo was his father. I was twenty-three years old, and he was my first crush.”

“The night before he was due to leave, I woke up to find him in my chambers.”

“I think my wife has nightmares about that sort of thing.”

“Many women do. Many also dream of it. It certainly took me a moment to realise I was awake. He told me he’d dreamed of me for years, before we’d ever met. That Aphrodite herself wanted us to be together.” For the first time Dr. Carter could remember, Helen looked ashamed. “God, I believed him.”

“You don’t think he was telling the truth?”

Helen moaned. “Oh, I don’t know. The poets thought he was, but of course they’d think that. And aren’t all couplings the will of Aphrodite?”

“So you went with him.”

“Of course I did. The chance to decide my future, to be with a man that hadn’t been laid out for me like toys in front of a child: it was like wine. We were creeping through the halls of the women’s quarters when I heard her voice.”

“Whose voice?”

“My daughter’s. She was just standing there, woken by a nightmare. She’d been looking for me. Moonlight was streaming over her through the windows. She didn’t say anything about Paris. Maybe she didn’t see him in the shadows. Maybe she didn’t know she was awake. Either way, she was soon pulling at my chiton.”

“What did you do?” Dr. Carter asked, dreading the answer.

“I took her back to her bed, and held her until she fell asleep again. Then I made my way to Paris’ ship.” Helen turned her head down. “I wouldn’t see Hermione again for ten years.”

Carter started at her. “You just left your daughter?”

“We were always going to part. At least this way I didn’t have to watch her whither. And should I have stolen her from her father, too?”

The doctor shook his head. “Lady, you wouldn’t be the first woman to outlive your kid. They don’t abandon them.”

“You don’t understand. You can’t. You’re mortal. And a man.”

Stephen stood up. “I think we’re done for today, Helen. The guards will be here in a sec. I’d recommend you weld the chain back up before they get here.”

“They won’t care.”

“Who does, here?”

Dr. Carter went home confused and guilty that night.

🗲

By Stephen Carter’s request, it was some time before he had another session with Helen of Sparta. Instead, he spent the better part of two months recreating his time with Allison Kinsey with a parade of new sad children.

By the time bureaucratic callousness put Dr. Carter and the goddess in the same room again, he didn’t complain.

“I told Pam,” he finally said after ten minutes of silence.  

“How did she take it?”

“That’s the thing. I thought she’d be screaming and chucking skillets at my head. But she sounded so… wounded. Resigned. Like I’d taken a knife and cut open an old scar.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Helen, could I ask how it all turned out? Paris, Troy.”

“There are whole epics about that, Stephen.”

“But they’re not you.”

“That they aren’t.” Helen took a deep breath. “Ilium was beautiful. The very grain of the buildings and walls were like nothing I’d ever seen before. Everywhere I looked, there were icons of gods whose names I had never heard. The gods I did recognize, they almost could’ve been different divinities altogether. For the first time, I knew how small my world truly was.”

“Sounds like when I went to London. I felt like a complete rube.”

“Paris’ family—the royal family—they never really liked me. I can’t blame them. They knew what I’d bring. The people loved us, though. The darling prince and his divine foreign lover. I think I was their Princess Margaret for a while.”

“Princess Margaret?”

“Don’t give me that look, I didn’t spend the last three thousand years in a cave. It was good for a while, what Paris and I had. Or at least it seemed that way from the inside. We’d make love till the walls of our chambers had disappeared under waves of shadow, or we’d go into the countryside, and he would show me where he once pastured his sheep. For a while, I thought it might last.”

“Then your husband came after you, didn’t he?”

“Not completely ignorant, I see.”

“I did go to school, you know.”

“True. And, yes, Menelaus did come for me, along with the rest of Greece. I shouldn’t have been surprised.  Menelaus’ throne was in question. An alien might have had a claim to one of our kingdoms. And Troy had riches beyond avarice. Heracles sacked it, long ago, and my people loved nothing more than emulating him. I don’t think you can could imagine what that war was like.”

Dr. Carter frowned. “I’ve lived through a world war, Helen.”

“Were you a soldier?”

“…No,” he admitted.

“Even if you were, I don’t think you’d understand. The war you remember was this distant, mechanized horror. Normal life died wherever it touched. It couldn’t happen that way in Troy. The Greeks were far from home in a land that did not love them. If they tried burning the fields or slaughtering all the cattle, they would starve too. So standards formed. Days where both sides would go about their lives; sacrifice, bury their dead. And that made it all the more terrible.”

Stephen blinked. “Sounds mighty civilized where I’m sitting.”

“Maybe on festival days. But it made war tolerable. And tolerable wars never end. It’s nothing but bodies and bitterness.”

“It broke Paris. His family hated him now as much as they did me. They muttered about old prophecies and dooms. He would rant and rave at me about how he should have taken the other offers. I didn’t know what he was talking about then. Now, I still don’t think it’d have made a difference. Fate has many paths, but they all lead to the same place.”

“Did you ever… you know, fight?”

“…Sometimes. I tried to hold back, but those were never good days. For anyone.”

“And then the horse?”

“There was no horse.”

“Wait, what?”

“There was no horse. It was poetry.”

“You’re telling me Troy and the gods are all real, but the Trojan horse wasn’t?”

“A thing can be true without another thing being true.”

“What happened then?”

“Come on, Carter. We’ve gotten drunk together over that book. Who is the god of horses?”

Carter thought about it. “Poseidon.”

“And what was his other domain?”

“The sea.”

“And…”

“…Earthquakes.”

“I woke with the shaking of the world. The walls were tumbling down, the Greeks pushing through their own terror and confusion to storm the city. And I walked among them, burning all who offended my gaze. And then Menelaus found me.”

“All at once, I realized what age was. This memory of a man, a decade removed. He saw me, bright with glory, my hands black with the ashes of Greeks, and still he approached me. That was when I realized.”

“Realized what?”

“The awful, terrible truth. All those reasons I thought of for why Menelaus had come for me, and it all boiled down to this: because he loved me. And I still loved him. And so we went home. We were both selfish enough to break a land over our knees for our own desires, and we got to go home.” Tears started trailing down Helen’s face. “Did you know how many villages were razed to the ground because of us, Stephen? How many sons the king of Troy had left? My daughter grew up without both her parents, because of our greed. Because he couldn’t let go. Because I was young and stupid. ”

Dr. Carter reached to wipe away Helen’s tears. They were warm like raindrops in the sun.

“Thank you for listening Stephen. Even if you don’t believe me, it’s good to be heard.”

“I do believe you.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

As Helen watched, the scientist got on his knees and crawled beneath the table. She felt arms wrap around her ankles. A story she once told the man rang again in her ears. Her father, the King of Sparta, receiving a supplicant.

“To be honest, child, I’d rather have had a knife to my throat.”

“Helen, me talking to you, being your friend, or whatever it is I am to you… has it made your life better? Made this place more bearable.”

“Yes, Stephen.”

“I’ve missed so many chances to be kind. To do the right thing. This place… it’s wrong. And I went along with it because I couldn’t be bothered to stand up for the people here, or even just not take their money. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being so bloody pointless.”

Helen stroked his hair. “It’s never too late.”

“There was a girl. Before we started talking. Allison, she was called. I was sort of in charge of her. I never did anything to help her, until this doctor fella came asking for her. Said he was going to take her somewhere better. I signed off on it—didn’t have a choice really, but I hardly cared. Now I’m hearing things… there’s some men waiting outside. Important men. They want your help.”

“And they asked you to try and convince me.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

She stood up. “It’s alright, Stephen. It’s time my holiday came to an end.” She started walking towards the door. “May I give you some advice?”

Dr. Carter looked at the goddess, still lying under the table. “Please.”

“They dug up Troy decades ago. More of it remains than my own home. Resign from this place. Go to Troy, and leave an offering.”

“To the gods?”

“No. To the people who died there, because of the decisions of people freer than them.”

“Then what do I do?”

“Try to be better.”

Helen knocked on the door. “I’m ready to talk.”

The man who opened the door was greying, battle-worn; his face knitted with tiny scars.

“Hello, Helen.”

“Hello, Timothy.”

1. A nickname that predated Stephen Carter by an age. ↩

2. One wonders whether or not the years spent shepherding in the hills counted as luxury. ↩

Previous Chapter                                                                                                           Next Chapter

Chapter Forty-Nine: Formicarius

Book Two: Titanomachy

DDHA Inspector Ronald Vanhurst nursed his mid-morning cup of tea in the corner-booth of the Camel Stop Diner while skimming The West Australian, trying not to think too hard about what he expected to find later that noon.

He glanced over his newspaper at Agent Louis Becker, who appeared to be consuming his toast and black coffee in the gaps between Vanhurst’s eyeblinks. The inspector decided to break the ice.

“Says here the Flying Man dropped in on the South African Parliament yesterday.”

That instantly caught Agent Becker’s attention, while Inspector Vanhurst just as instantly realized he had picked the wrong small-talk subject.

“What’s he done now?” the American asked in his cool, yet interrogative, Midwestern manner.

Ronald sighed softly. The poor inspector’s life the past few weeks had been a river of unwelcome news. First he drew the office shit-stick, condemning him with having to make the bi-annual inspection of Timothy Valour’s pet experiment. Then he got word that the old bloke in charge of said experiment was using it to run some crazy teenage breeding scheme, almost immediately followed by the news that Northam had been attacked by supervillains, one of whom was still at large, and that the Institute was apparently in a state of anarchy. So now Ron’s box-ticking mission had turned into the bastard child of a reconnaissance mission in hostile territory and a child welfare visit—as performed by a man trained to inspect safety railings in tinning plants.

And then, finally, there was Agent Becker, his DOPO1 shadow for the trip.  

Still, he started it. “Apparently he told the South Africans they were giving the blacks back the franchise, or else everyone in the country would wake up with their colours swapped.” Ron chuckled. “Think he could do it?”

“He’s overplaying his hand,” Agent Becker said authoritatively. “If he’s so unstoppable, why did he bother being quiet when he took out the nukes?”

Vanhurst shrugged. “Maybe he was bored? Maybe the Flying Man is just what happens when you can do anything and don’t have anything better to do.”

Louis shook his head. “He has to know he’s not unique.”

Ron raised a greying eyebrow. “Know a Flying Lady, do ya?”

“Nothing and nobody is special, Vanhurst. If there isn’t already another Flying Man out there, someone will invent him eventually.”

“Then how will we handle that bloke?”

The DOPO agent’s voice was steady and grave, like he was sitting in on a policy meeting instead of brunching in some also-ran country town. “We’ll deal with that when we come to it.”

Vanhurst scoffed. “Because that worked out so well for your lot with the Soviets.”

Agent Becker allowed himself a shrug. “We’re still here, aren’t we?”

Ron let out a grudgingly affirmative grunt. Inspector Vanhurst could understand why the DDHA was trying to cozy up to their American cousins. The world was changing. Mother Britain had been hemorrhaging power and territory since the war, while America kept on rising in the world like it had designs towards the letter “u.” What Vanhurst couldn’t figure out was why the boss of bosses wanted him to show some random DOPA bloke what was shaping up to be one of their biggest fuck-ups?

Then again, what did the DDHA have to show for themselves besides fuck-ups? The Americans had Pendergast, while Australia had one mad old queen and a lot of bitter prisoners that hadn’t figured out their cells were made of paper yet.

Agent Becker was grimacing at something. “There’s something not right about this town.”

Ron followed the American’s eyes towards a pair of young boys running around with comfort-blanket capes tied around their necks, laughing as they weaved around the legs of a fuming ginger bus-boy.

Vanhurst leaned over the table. “Gonna let you in on a secret, mate.” He made a big show of looking around the diner, screened his mouth with his hand and whispered, “They’re not really supers.”     

Agent Becker didn’t smile. “That’s not what I mean. Look around. At the people.”

Smiling. Laughter. Two sets of clearly embarrassed parents, but even they seemed more amused than anything else.

Ron looked back at Becker. “They’re kids, Louis.”

“It doesn’t make sense, Vanhurst. My intel said the Northamites weren’t on good terms with the sorcerers.”

“Demis, Becker.”

“Magically empowered individuals,” The agent insisted. He pointed at the blackboard menu hanging behind the diner-counter, bordered by chalky, pastel wreaths and surprisingly well-detailed koalas2.  Specifically, he was pointing at a sandwich:

THE NEW HUMAN     

Vanhurst tapped the busboy on the arm as he passed. “Excuse me, can you tell us what a ‘new human’ is?”

“It’s new,” the red-haired teen explained. “Pretty much two sandwiches inside another sandwich. It’s free if you finish it all… lookin’ to order it?”

“Nah, just curious.”

The busboy wandered off, muttering something about finchy time-wasters under his breath.

“Why would they name a sandwich after a school for sorcerers if they didn’t like them?” Agent Becker asked rhetorically. “It doesn’t add up.”

Inspector Vanhurst rubbed the bridge of his nose. To be honest, he’d been a little intimidated by Agent Becker at first. With his black suit, glasses, and military-neat haircut, the American looked like he immigrated from a world built out of blurry photographs and strung together with red-string. After spending the better part of a morning and a two hour drive in a rented truck with the man, Ron was beginning to suspect that if fortune hadn’t blown Louis Becker towards DOPO, he’d probably be busy building those worlds himself.

“A bunch of supervillains attacked here a few days back. Apparently some kids from the Institute warded them off. They’re probably just… appreciative.”

“I don’t buy it,” said Becker. “Bigots don’t distinguish between good and bad actors. That’s what makes them bigots!”

“Bigots?”

“Well, that’s what they are.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’m suggesting,” Becker whispered, “that it’s not outside the realm of possibility for the NHI sorcerers to have cast a spell over Northam.”

“So you think these people are prejudiced against ‘sorcerers’?”

“It’s a matter of record.”

“So clearly that means the victims of this prejudice have bewitched their minds with black magic.”

“…Life is complicated.”

The inspector checked his cheap quartz watch. It was time for them to get going. The sorcerers were waiting for them. “That it is, Agent Becker, that it is.”

⬗

Dr. Herbert Lawrence was knocked out of his fretful, hungover dreams by a hard punch to his side.  

The children were gathered around the old man’s bed: Stratogale, Ex-Nihilo, Reverb and Myriad. Reverb had the dressing gown they had dyed and sequined for Prospero slung over her shoulder, while the youngest girl was carrying a bundle of rough rope.

Stratogale was hovering a few inches above the floor, a yellow paper-crown on her head. “It’s inspection day, Laurie.”

Lawrence sighed. “Trust me, child, I know.” A weak, despairing rictus spread across his face. “Queen of the festivities, are we, Stratogale?”

The girl slapped him hard. It took Lawrence a second to realize he was still alive. How easily could Stratogale have sent his head flying into the wall?

“It’s Sadie, Bertie. This”—she tapped at the crown, before removing and slipping it over—“I was just keeping it warm for the king of the festival.”

“We got the idea from your mate Graves’ book3,” Lana jeered.

Lawrence remembered what his friend said became of those ancient ceremonial kings at the end of their reign. The idea was colourless; removed, like the weather forecast for a far-flung city.

Mavis’ manufactured voice echoed like a priestess in a cavernous temple. Allison, prepare the king for the procession.

Allison giggled and saluted. “Yes, ma’am!”

The little girl set about binding Lawrence’s hands in an expert handcuff knot. She was naked, bar a thin layer of dyed frost and a feather tucked behind her ear, her face streaked with acrylic paint like some ghastly picture-book Indian.

What was left of Lawrence despaired for Myriad. Not too long ago, he had believed she was the beginning of a cognitive revolution. Now, he realized, the girl was nothing more than a child wearing adult knowledge like her mother’s shoes and lipstick.

He didn’t resist when they pulled him to his feet, draped him in that butchered wizard’s robe, and started marching him down through the house.

Mary, Cormey, and Melusine were in the kitchen when they passed, the nereid keeping watch over the teachers with a cup of black coffee.

Bryant went ballistic when he saw Lawrence trussed up. He jumped out of his chair. “You ungrateful little shits!”

Lawrence and Mary locked eyes for a moment. The old woman said nothing. She looked so tired.

Cormey tried running to the headmaster’s aid, but Françoise blocked the man with her arm.

“For God’s sake, Mels, do you want Mael thrown into McClare?”

Fran smirked. “Bryant, if David doesn’t want to go to McClare, nobody’s taking him to McClare.”

Tiresias was waiting to open the door for the procession. “All hail the king!”

Lawrence managed to muster a question for his former student. “How do you see this game turning out for you, Tiresias?”

The psychic closed his eyes and put his fingers to his temples, groping the air with his other hand. “I see… a penthouse… on the Gold Coast… full of beautiful women…” He opened his eyes and grinned. “And you know what, Bertie? I think they’re all over twenty-one.”

It took Lawrence a moment to realize Tiresias wasn’t kidding.

He’d won.

“Did you get the sign?” Sadie asked cooly.

Alberto clapped. “Oh, yeah!” The esper picked up a wooden placard threaded through with the same rope that bound Lawrence, hanging it around the old man’s neck. “There. Now everyone knows who did what.”

A throne waited for Lawrence in front of the house, carved from rough grey iron. Well, “carved.” Lawrence had no doubt it was Ex-Nihilo and Growltiger’s handiwork. He was mildly surprised a pyre hadn’t been built around the thing. Disappointed, even.  

Haunt was waiting beside the chair. He was in the white dress shirt and pressed slacks he had worn for his and Britomart’s Naming, his usually wavy hair drowned in pomade.

“Think the inspector will be here soon?” he asked the girls.

Myriad crooked her head. “I there’s a couple new songs getting closer. Too fast for feet. Wonder who the other bloke is?” She looked up at Sadie. “Can I go play now?”

Sadie ruffled her hair fondly. “Sure, kiddo.”

The child bounded off like a gazelle. Lawrence watched her go. How many learned men lay forgotten and neglected within that painted savage?

The teenagers shoved him down into the throne, before Haunt stepped in front of his teacher, regarding him like a squashed bug with human insides.

Lawrence smiled wanly. “I haven’t seen you this well dressed in years, my boy.” He jerked his head in the direction Myriad had run off. “Certainly making more of an effort than some of your brothers and sisters.”

Tom Long kicked Lawrence in the shins. “Just trying to make a good impression, your highness.”

The leftover scotch in Lawrence’s system dulled the pain. It might also have dulled the shock when he realized his legs had been sunked into the throne. He looked like a half-finished statue.

“And we don’t want you spoiling the surprise for the inspector.”

Reverb wrapped an arm around Lawrence’s shoulders, her voice a child’s parody of sultry:

That’s why us girls are gonna keep you company while you wait.

Lawrence’s ears were wracked with drill hisses and a thousand wasps. He futilely struggled against his bindings, desperate to cover his ears.

Lana told Tom, “Go wait with the others while I try to remember how to make mustard gas or something.”

Tom nodded. “I hear ya, bosslady.”

He joined the other children gathered around the Institute gates. A bedsheet banner with “WELCOME INSPECTORS” painted in bright, colourful letters hung from poles of gold light over the dirt-trail.

Booms like prowling thunderclaps closed in behind Tom, and the sky darkened above him. He looked up and nodded. “David, Allie.”

The craggy ice-titan whose shoulder Allison rode on waved, making a sound like wrestling mountains. “Hi, Tom.”

A white van4 trundled up the road. Before coming to a stop in front of the gate. A middle aged man in a khaki vest and shorts climbed out of the driver’s door, followed by a much younger passenger in very square sunglasses and a black suit. The best thing you could say about it was that it hid the sweat-stains.

Inspector Vanhurst blanched at the sight of the ice-giant. Agent Becker’s hand went instinctively for his hip, trying to find a gun that wasn’t there.

“Oh, lighten up fellas,” Bran said near the front of the crowd. “It’s just David.”

Vanhurst managed to compose himself, flashing his best youth pastor smile. “Good afternoon, children. I…” He trailed off for a moment. The children were smiling too much. They looked hungry. He took a deep breath. “I’m Inspector Vanhurst”—he gestured vaguely at his companion—“and this my friend Mr. Becker.”

“Agent Becker,” he corrected.

“Sure, fine. Anyway, we’re here to…” Vanhurst didn’t know how to explain it. “—We’re here to speak to your teachers and headmaster. Is that okay?”

No, that was awful. He sounded like he was asking permission.

The children mobbed the two men, chattering and fighting for their attention. Tom pushed his way to the centre of the mass shook their hands.

“G’day, I’m Tom Long. Don’t know if they gave you fellas a student list, but I’m not on it.” He grinned broadly. “I’m one of the kids that got to go on a picnic with the babies when your lot came a callin’.”

“Me too!” Mabel chirped through a conjured megaphone.

Vanhurst blinked. “Wait, then where’d you come from?”

“What, me? Lawrence bought me off the Coven.”

The inspector’s eyes went wide. “The Coven?”

That caught Agent Becker’s attention like a bomb blast. “A coven? Your school principal dealt with mages? Were they psychic or ritualistic?”

Vanhurst sighed. “It’s just what the local supervillains call themselves.” He hoped to God nobody mentioned the Witch of Claremont.

“Yeah,” said Tom. “He paid them like, a million pounds or something for me.”

“…Your headmaster buys kids?”

“Sometimes,” Tom replied casually. “Few of us Laurie just found on the streets and never told your lot.”

“One of us died last month,” Mabel interjected, her voice shaking in a way that probably wasn’t the megaphone’s fault. “Did Lawrence tell you that?”

Agent Becker looked at Vanhurst. The confusion practically burnt through his sunglasses. The inspector just shook his head.

Allison let down from the walking ice-sculpture, landing on and clinging to Agent Becker’s back like a spider-monkey.

“Argh—” He caught himself. “Hello, little girl.”

“He punched me once. In the face. With a big metal glove. Then he pulled me by the hair and locked me in a dungeon!”

“…A dungeon?”

“Pretty much! Didn’t even have a bed! Or a toilet! Even McClare had a toilet!”

“Sorry to hear that, young lady… about the dungeon, I mean, not the toilet.”

The ice-giant cracked at the mid-section, David bursting out out of it like Phanes from the cosmic egg. He landed at the agent and inspector’s feet. “Yeah, I was pretty much never happy when I listened to Lawrence. Got better when I stopped, though. Wanna see me make it snow?”

“Uh, sure,” answered Vanhurst. Christ, he thought. And the DDHA had told him to expect secrecy.      

From his grasping throne, Lawrence watched as David turned his giant into a blizzard. He wondered what his father would think, seeing his son minstrel for rootstock humans like that.

In the thousands of times he had pictured this day, Lawrence had imagined himself in a state of mind shuttering anxiety, like a man with three sixes on his hand come Judgement Day. Instead, he felt like lead plunging to the bottom of the sea. Inexorable, but indifferent. When he fell, he would make no sound. He would’ve said T.S Eliot was right, if the children weren’t cheering at the end.   

Linus walked out of the house. “Hey.”

Hey, echoed Mavis. How’s Mels doing?

“Still keeping an eye on Cormey, really. He keeps ranting about ‘Laurie’s vision’ and the future of the species.”

“God,” said Sadie. “He’s such a lickspittle.” She looked at her headmaster. “Isn’t he, Lawrence?”

He didn’t answer.

“I knew kids like him back in real school,” Lana added. “The ones who were always dobbing on everyone.” She laughed. “They always took it the worst when it was their turn.”

What about Mrs Gillespie?

Linus shrugged. “Don’t think she knows what to think anymore?”

Mavis scowled. What else is new?

The party drew close, Inspector Vanhurst trying to shoo away the children like overly friendly flies while Agent Becker tried drilling them for their sorcerous secrets.

“Look, kids, it’s great you’re being cooperative, but I really need to speak to your—”

The inspector stopped in his tracks when he caught sight of the king of exhibition. A bedraggled, half-entombed old warlock with a “rapist” sign hanging around his neck.

“Good God,” whispered Agent Becker. “Where’s his legs?”  

Sadie floated forward, pointing at her seven-month baby bump. “See this, gents? This wasn’t an accident. Me and my sisters? We weren’t being ‘careless’ or ‘sluts’.” She stabbed her finger at Lawrence. “It was him! Because he wanted some new baby-dolls to play with! And he couldn’t keep them safe.”

The inspector shuffled his feet. “Well, that’s terrible, miss, but…”

“We knew,” Agent Becker said flatly.

…What?

“Miss Winter confessed everything. Then Miss Fletcher fell out of the headman’s mirror and confessed it all again.”

Lana shook her head slowly. “What?” Then she realized what the inspector had said and glared at Lawrence. “You said they were looking for Zy!”

Lawrence quirked his shoulder weakly. “Why worry you all?”

Lana smacked him.  

Vanhurst’s shoulders drooped. “…I think we need to talk.”

⬖

“This is a travesty, obviously.”

Sadie nodded from the other side of the library table. “You don’t have to tell us that.”

Linus cleared his throat. “I don’t wanna to be rude,” he pointed at Agent Becker sitting next to the inspector, “but should he really be here?”

“Don’t mind me,” the American answered, “just an observer.”

The remaining human staff of the New Human Institute hadn’t been invited to the meeting. In fact, they had been gently but firmly encouraged to stay in their rooms for the duration. Mary and Lawrence put up no resistance, but Bryant Cormey had already barged in twice, before being seconded in the dark dimension.

“So what happens now?” asked Melusine.

Vanhurst said, “Well, if it were up to me and Becker here, Dr. Lawrence would be heading to the police station,” he allowed himself a smile, “but it seems like you’ve got him well under heel.”

Plus, you don’t try to take a tiger’s meal off them.

Lana cracked her knuckles. “You got that right.”

We don’t care about Laurie, Reverb said, her voice a steady iron string of sound. What happens to us?

“You said Zy—Eliza talked with Tim Valour,” added Sadie. “Did she have our babies with her? Where are they?”

“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”

God, why didn’t he just tell them he didn’t know? He sounded like Becker!

“That’s not a good enough answer, Mr. Vanhurst.”

Alberto swirled his glass of merlot. “Don’t get so worked up, Sadie.” A sip. “Did Eliza ever strike you as a baby killer?”

Sadie looked at Ophelia’s father like she was considering half-orphaning her.

Ronald Vanhurst threw his hands up. “Look, I’m sorry I don’t have all the answers, but can I at least try and give you some of them?”

Sadie folded her arms. “All right.”

The inspector went into pitch mode. “Before New Years, you and your schoolmates will be transported—comfortably—to new accommodation.”

‘New accomodation’ doesn’t mean the asylums, does it?

Vanhurst shook his head. “Nothing of the sort. The DDHA is establishing their own schools.” He forced a chuckle. “I hear they’re calling them ‘academies of tomorrow’. I assure you, after graduation”—he looked at Fran and Alberto—“not that I expect all of you to be there long, you’ll be well compensated public servants.”

Fran and the eldest students shared looks that might as well have been telepathic.           

“Afraid we can’t take you up on that offer,” answered Linus.

That wasn’t part of the script. “You—you can’t… what?”

“We’re not going,” Lana replied plainly.

“But you have to go somewhere!”

“Why?” asked Sadie. “Regular folks don’t get told where to live by the government5.”

“But they still need somewhere to live!”

“We’ll stay here,” said Linus. “We have money—plenty, in fact. The neighbours are fine with us now.” He smiled. “We’re not against working—”

Alberto cut in, “Speak for yourself.”

“…But we’ll do it on our own terms.”

Fran’s eyes glowed. “Me and my son will not be your pets.”

Agent Becker looked Linus in the eye. “Don’t you want to serve your country, boy?”

“I thought you were just an observer,” Lana said sourly.

Linus smiled softly. “I’m not even allowed to vote, Agent Becker.”

Funny, said Reverb. You won’t draft ladies, but as soon as we have powers…

Vanhurst looked around the table, exasperation burning the colour from his cheeks. “Kids, even if this worked—and it won’t—what about all the little kids? Who’ll take care of them?”

“We will,” said Linus.

Fran looked hard at the DDHA man. “They’re our responsibility now. Our family.”

We’re not handing them over to the bastards who shoved them in the asylums in the first place, who gave them to Laurie.            

Vanhurst shook his head. “It won’t work. I’m sorry, but it won’t. The DDHA, they aren’t going to allow you to… squat like this.”

Fran scoffed. “Allow?”

Agent Becker looked taken aback. “That’s seditious talk, ma’am.”

A broad, Southern accent washed over the library. Y’all better mind y’all business, yankee!

“Excuse me,” said Alberto. “Is this a package deal? Because I’d be game for it.”

Fran and the students all looked at the esper.

“Seriously?” asked Sadie.

“Why not? I’ve spent thirteen years at this bloody school. My résumé is basically empty. Don’t get me wrong, I support you guys but… well, I just want to leave. Go new places. Make some money that wasn’t given to me by an old Wellsian Nazi.” He turned to the inspector. “If you’d give me a lift back to head office or wherever, I’d be willing to leave now.”

Ronald rested his chin on his hand dejectedly. “Sure, why not. At least I’ll have something to show.”  

Alberto got to his feet. His expression was oddly sombre. “I’ll get myself packed then… Sadie, I’ll try to look up Ophelia. Get word back to you.”

Sadie didn’t look at him. “Thanks.”

The psychic put at a hand on Fran’s shoulder. “You’ll be fine, right?”

The water-nymph stood and kissed him. “Of course I will.” She smiled. “You of all people shouldn’t have to ask.”

Alberto looked back at the inspector. “Right, time to start loading the whites into the van. Cormey better not be helping himself.”

⬗

Lawrence and Mary Gillespie sat together in the old man’s study. Dark was creeping in, and neither teacher could be bothered setting out candles. Soon, all they could make out was each other’s outlines, and a few snatches of moonlight off the surface of their drinks.

“You lied to us.”

“What good would it have done telling you?”

“What good did keeping quiet do?”

“Point.”

“Alberto’s gone. Didn’t even say goodbye.”

A grunt. “Not unlike him.”

“Why should he have, Lawrence? All we did was keep him cooped up here like a battery hen. At least out there he can do some good for his kind.”

For a moment, Lawrence considered telling Mary what Alberto had done to her. What they had done to her.

No. She loved that boy. She loved them all. Let her keep that, at least.

“Nothing makes sense anymore.”

“I know.”

“Except that’s the thing. I can’t remember why they used to make sense. I think about the stirpiculture and… your words, Lawrence. All those explanations and justifications. They don’t connect anymore.”

“My dear, sometimes we have to wait for history to work out the rights and wrongs.”

“I can’t think about history anymore, Lawrence. All I can think of is how my Frank would look at me…”

“Mary—”

“But then I think, if you lied about this, Laurie, what else have you lied to me about.” Mary leaned forward in her chair, a blade of dusty, pearly light revealing the tears running down her cheeks. “Lawrence, I am going to ask you this only once: how did Adam Sinclair die?”

“…An aneurysm. Poor Adam’s death, it was unavoidable.”

The old woman stood up, her face returning to the darkness. “You should go, Lawrence.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you leave the children so distressed. Because I can’t trust you anymore. And because I love you, Lawrence. They’re coming for you. And I don’t want to see you dragged off in chains.” Mary started off towards the door. “Fetch me a candle and I’ll pack you a bag.”

They said nothing to each other until they were outside, under the unchallenged country-stars.

“Goodbye, Mary.”

“Goodbye, Lawrence. I wish I knew your heart better.”

Mary watched her old friend walk away into the night. Before he had gone completely from her sight, she spotted some silhouettes by lorikeet dorm.

It was the girls, along with Linus and a pyjama-clad Elsewhere—Arnold, Mary reminded herself.

They were talking:

You sure you have to leave?

“Yeah,” answered Sadie. “I need to find Ophelia. I can’t just wait for Alberto to give me answers. To give us all answers.”

“Eliza would never hurt the babies,” insisted Linus.

“No, she wouldn’t… and I’ll believe that as soon as I’ve seen them with my own eyes.”

Elsewhere rubbed his eyes sleepily. “Where do you wanna go?”

Mary was running towards them, her nightgown billowing in the warm, humid air. “Wait!” She stopped in front of Sadie, panting. “Lawrence… he’s gone. You don’t have to go.”

“Oh, Mrs Gillespie, it’s not about him. It’s about our kids.”

Mrs Gillespie moaned, “You’re all leaving me…”

Lana stroked the teacher’s face, drawing away tears. “We’re a school, Mary. Supposed to happen.”

Mary looked at Sadie with wet eyes. “I’m sorry, child. For all of this. Can you ever forgive me?”

Sadie took Arnold’s hand. “Arn, I need you to send me to where Ophelia is. Can you do that?”

Arnold groaned tiredly. “I think so. Might be kinda tricky.” The green started sparking under the boy’s skin.

The flying girl looked back at Mrs Gillespie. She smiled softly. “I’ll try, Mrs G. Someday, I’ll try.”

There was a flash.

In the space Sadie had stood, Mary Gillespie fell to her knees, and wept.

Gently, Linus helped the old woman to her feet. “Come on, Mrs Gillespie, let’s get you a cup of tea.”

And so, Mary’s students led her to their fire.   

⬗

Inspector Vanhurst didn’t think he shared any kinship with Agent Becker or the New Human Institute’s telepath. Then they got called up in front of their bosses.

The three men sat awkwardly in plastic chairs that felt designed for primary schoolers, the DOPO-DDHA joint committee glaring at them like a parliament of owls.  

The DOPO attache released a gout of cigarette smoke. “Would you say these children are no longer amenable to human authority?”

The inspector glanced at Becker and Moretti, before tapping his microphone and answering, “I suppose?”

Timothy Valour sighed. “I think we’ll have to take steps.”

1. The Department of Psychonautics and Occultism, the American governmental body consolidated in the 1960s to oversee superhuman affairs. ↩

2. Blackboard menus are a common victim of frustrated amateur artists. ↩

3. Specifically the section of The Greek Myths in which Robert Graves relates his theories regarding the role of kings in a pre-Hellenic matriarchy, with the ironclad certainty of only the truly mistaken. ↩

4. Rented, much to Agent Becker’s disappointment. ↩

5. Unless they were Aboriginal, of course. ↩

Previous Chapter                                                                                                      Next Chapter