Titania gives a fey smile.
“I’ve made a life here. Apocalyptic. Chaotic. Still a life.”
She twines her fingers through Olga’s big mitt and they look so ridiculously happy amid the ruins of the conference room that frankly it’s all a bit too hard for me to swallow.
My sour look’s been a long time coming. Jane’s face crumples.
“What will you do now?” she asks.
“I’m not sure I can just make lemonade like you two,” I say back. Shrug. “This isn’t my home. My home, my stupid world, it’s still too fresh. If we’re lucky The Twelve have handled the Matrioshka problem –”
The women hiss, reminding me I’m not meant to say that name. I shrug again.
“If that’s the case – and it’s a big if – then I can rest easier knowing at least we did some good here and it’s right for me to move on.”
“We did good, handsome?” Olga frowns. “Tell me. What did we do?”
I have to reflect a moment on another Red Monolith dying on my watch. It’s a forcible effort to rewind back through recent memories to eke out evidence of my ambit claims.
Into the awkward gap stumbles a skinny old Japanese man carrying a janitor’s bucket and a broom. His missing teeth gape in the bluish glow of his Twelve-ordained slave collar. He gawks at us.
“Ah . . . you, superheroes?”
I almost laugh at the naïve comment, but Titania and then Olga turn toward him as serious as if he was a president.
“What is it?”
“Helicopter crash make fire in Asakusa Corporation building. Rebels with rocket, yes? Spectra dead. Riots starting. People trapped.”
There’s an air of resignation that would read as fatalism at any other moment – or maybe that’s me – as the pair turn back to me and the hole in the wall beyond us.
“Until you figure it out, there’s a world here that needs heroes. See?” Titania says. “Not everyone has forgotten how it used to be.”
I shrug, too morose and listless to really have the energy to answer, about as much enthusiasm as if they asked me to eat 50 hard-boiled eggs. The women sense my apathy and move to the breach, the old janitor just watching, and as they whip through the exit tracing the doppler of emergency sirens I feel a familiar but forgotten pulse at the back of my belt and pull the Enercom phone free.
It’s one of the few advantages of my constantly recharging electro-magnetic field that the cell never goes flat. All the same, I’m as surprised as anyone to hear it playing It’s Raining Men (reset) so far across the cosmos from home.
I flip the phone open, frowning.
“Uh, yeah?”
There’s nary a crackle as Tessa’s voice comes through loud and clear.
“Tell me you’ve called a lawyer, dad. What’s this I hear about you assaulting Negator?”
*
CONTINUED in ZEPHYR IV
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